Adania Shibli

Worldwide Reading for Ashraf Fayadh on 14 January 2016 at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. Shibli appears second from the right.

Shibli was born in 1974.[1][2] She holds a Ph.D. from the University of East London in Media and Cultural Studies.[3] Her dissertation is titled Visual Terror: A Study of the Visual Compositions of the 9/11 Attacks and Major Attacks in the 'War on Terror' by British and French Television Networks.[4] She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the EUME c/o the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin.[5] Shibli has taught at the University of Nottingham, and since 2013, has worked as a part-time professor at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine.[6]

Shibli and her children split their time between Jerusalem and Berlin.[7] Shibli speaks Arabic, English, Hebrew, French, Korean, and German.[8]

Since 1996, Shibli has published in literary magazines in Europe and the Middle East.[9] Since then, she has expanded her work to include novels, plays, short stories, and narrative essays, published in numerous languages in anthologies, art books, and literary and cultural magazines.[10]

Her non-fiction works include the art book Dispositions (Ramallah: Qattan), and a collected of essays called A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialogue with Edward Said (Berlin: HKW).[10] The collection of essays was turned into a symposium curated by Shibli in 2013, which took place at the House of World Cultures in Berlin.[11] She invited artists and academics to reflect on the work and ideas of Edward W. Said, a theorist and critic known for his 1978 book Orientalism.

• Minor Detail (تفصيل ثانوي, Tafṣīl Ṯānawī), Fitzcarraldo Editions / New Directions, 2020, ISBN 9780811229074
• Keep your eye on the wall: Palestinian landscapes, Saqi Books, London, 2013, ISBN 9780863567599
• We are all equally far from love (Kulluna Ba’id bethat al Miqdar aan el-Hub) (كلنا بعيد بذات المقدار عن الحب), Clockroot Books, Northampton, MA, 2012, ISBN 9781566568630
• Touch (Masaas) (مساس), Clockroot Books, Northampton, MA, 2010, ISBN 9781566568074

Shibli has received the Young Writer’s Award–Palestine by the A. M. Qattan Foundation for her novels Touch in 2001 and We are all equally far from love in 2003.[12] She was named as one of the Beirut39, a group of 39 Arab writers under the age of 40 chosen through a contest organized by Banipal magazine and the Hay Festival. Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, was shortlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature.[13] In 2021, Minor Detail was also longlisted for the International Booker Prize.[14]

Shibli's novel Minor Detail was selected for the LiBeraturpreis 2023 by the German literary organization LitProm. Based partially on historical facts, the novel recounts the rape and murder of a Palestinian girl in 1949 by Israeli soldiers, who were later convicted of murder (but not rape) by an Israeli court.[15][16] Originally, the award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair had been announced for 20 October 2023.[17] A few days before the announced date, LitProm canceled the ceremony at the Book Fair and postponed it to an unspecified date in response to protests by German journalists who had said the novel expressed antisemitic attitudes. Further, the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas was named as another reason for the cancellation.[18] In response to this, the Emirates Publishers Association and the Arab Publishers’ Association withdrew from the Fair,[19] and the publishers of the English translation made the ebook available for free for the duration of the Fair.[20]

On 12 October, the prominent literary critic Iris Radisch spoke out in favour of the awarding of the literary prize in Die Zeit weekly magazine. She referred to the international recognition that the novel has received and that it was also "rightly celebrated as a literary masterpiece" by German literary critics. Further, Radisch wrote that an outstanding literary novel by a Palestinian writer was now being associated with the "current mass murders of Hamas" had nothing to do with serious literary criticism.[21] In his article of 13 October in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, literary scholar and journalist Paul Ingendaay referred to an interview with Shibli that he had already conducted in 2022 on the occasion of the German publication of her novel. From this, Ingendaay quotes Shibli's statements as a writer who is interested in the literary representation of topics such as control and fear of a person, thereby enabling the author and reader to gain hidden insights about themselves. In summary, Ingendaay wrote that Shibli condemned any form of nationalism and had spoken out in favor of "perceiving the pain of others." In response to his questions about Shibli's identity as a Palestinian, Ingendaay continued: "In the further conversation, Shibli was wary of political statements and especially of agitation. Instead, she insisted on appreciating her novel Minor Detail — and fiction writing more generally — as a place for thinking about language, place, and identity, which always depends on who is reading it.”[22]

On the other hand, according to journalist Ulrich Noller, the novel serves “anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives, and it not only allows such readings, but opens up space for them.” The writer Maxim Biller expressed his view in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that “the book ends with the symbolic murder of the frightened Palestinian first-person narrator by a few faceless, nameless, brutal Israeli soldiers, which in the end turns the novel into just an unliterary piece of propaganda “.[23]

Prompted by the announced cancellation, more than 1000 authors and intellectuals, including Colm Tóibín, Hisham Matar, Kamila Shamsie, William Dalrymple as well as Nobel prize winners Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk, criticized the Frankfurt Book Fair and wrote in an open letter that the Book Fair had “a responsibility to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down”.[24][25] In his speech at the fair, philosopher Slavoj Žižek described the fair's decision as 'scandalous'.[26]

The dead are ever present in Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail. Indirectly through multiple narrators, Shibli constructs a meditation on brutality, war, memory and the collective suffering of the Palestinian people in this chilling novel in which the legacy of violence remains unresolved.

— Lauren LeBlanc, The Observer[7]

• Adania Shibli's short story A Tin Ball, in English translation on ArabLit magazine