On cancellations – Aishvarya Kavi in NYT:

‘An award ceremony that was set to honor a novel by a Palestinian author at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week was canceled on Friday “due to the war in Israel,” according to Litprom, the German literary association that organizes the prize.
The novel, by Adania Shibli, is titled “Minor Detail” in English and tells the true story of the 1949 rape and murder of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers, according to its German publisher, Berenberg Verlag.
A German-language version translated from the original Arabic was published in 2022, and a previous English translation was nominated for a National Book Award in 2020 and the International Booker Prize in 2021.
The ceremony was intended to celebrate the novel for winning the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literature prize awarded annually to an author from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world and presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the global publishing industry’s largest gatherings.
The controversy in Germany surrounding the novel began this summer when Ulrich Noller, a journalist on the Litprom jury, resigned over the decision to give the literature prize to Ms. Shibli’s novel. A literary critic with Die Tageszeitung, a left-leaning German newspaper, reignited the debate this week, accusing the book of portraying “the State of Israel as a murder machine,” though other German critics have praised the novel.’

(…)

‘Juergen Boos, the Frankfurt Book Fair’s director, said in a statement that the organization strongly condemned “Hamas’s barbaric terror against Israel,” adding, “Our thoughts are with the victims, their relatives and all the people suffering from this war.” Politics have sometimes loomed large over the Frankfurt Book Fair, which became a stage for European leaders to campaign against rising far-right parties in 2017, and faced a boycott from Iran in 2015, when Salman Rushdie attended the event. (Mr. Rushdie is set to return to the fair this year.)
In the statement, Mr. Boos said that organizers had “spontaneously decided to create additional stage moments for Israeli voices” at the fair.’

Read the article here.

This is an unfortunate decision.

I interviewed Adania Shibli this spring in Amsterdam. You can see the interview here.

Het novel is indebted to Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for the barbarians,’ she openly acknowledges this.

You can easily see criticism of Israel through the novel, but her book is a novel, and every book that deserves that name is by nature ambiguous.

The decision is not helpful to Israel, not helpful to Jews living outside Israel, not helpful to Adania Shibli neither to Palestinians.

I read the novel differently than some people in Germany did, but that’s not important. Too much sensitivity is almost never helpful, the reader, the student, the citizen can handle more than some people think.

Perhaps this is all meant to create some publicity for the prize and its winner. Perhaps.