Ghalya Saadawi, esteemed theory tutor at the DAI since 2018, has been shortlisted for the 2023 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for the best proposal for a book-length essay by a writer resident in the UK & Ireland who has yet to secure a publishing deal. In addition, the winner will have the opportunity to spend up to three months in residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, to work on their book, which will then be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. “Between October and November” is an essay on time and loss under an extended, capitalist modernity, on what we keep and what is taken away. The essay has its beginnings in a letter to a friend, in which Saadawi wrote about political family histories, fashion and music’s retromania, globalisation and postmodernity, postponement of writing, childhood powers. Written in fragments and digressions that weave cultural criticism, family memoir and life writing, this essay additionally probes the cultural obsession with the past and its continued eruption in the present, mourning, foreclosed revolutionary legacies and their tenacity, and the contradictions of capitalist destruction and tradition.