Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s 2021 novel A Minor Matter won a literature prize in Germany, but the awards ceremony in her honour was recently cancelled.
The decision to cancel the award ceremony was made by the literary organization behind the prize.
The organization’s LiBeraturpreis prize is awarded to an author from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world and presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Shibli’s book is set in 1949 and follows Israeli soldiers’ rape of a young Palestinian girl. “A haunting meditation on war, violence, and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment,” reads an online description of the novel.
Originally written in Arabic, the book was translated into German in 2022 and its English-language version was nominated for the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize.
However, the lauded book has faced opposition, including over the LiBeraturpreis award. Earlier in the summer, a journalist on the jury resigned once Shibli’s book was chosen as the 2023 recipient. And earlier this week a critic for the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung accused the book of showing “the State of Israel as a murder machine.”
Litprom is still hoping to hold an awards ceremony with a “suitable format and setting” after the fair, which runs from October 18 to October 22.
“Hamas’s barbaric terror against Israel,” Juergen Boos, the Frankfurt Book Fair’s director, said in a statement according to the Times. “Our thoughts are with the victims, their relatives and all the people suffering from this war.”
