Current Events > Frankfurt Book Fair Cancels Award Ceremony for Palestinian Author

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Organizers cited the Israel-Hamas war as the reason for stepping back from honoring a novel about the 1949 murder of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers.

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The Palestinian author and essayist Adania Shibli in 2021.

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 industrys 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. Shiblis 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.

The Israel-Hamas war has inflamed longstanding divisions among Germanys cultural institutions over support for Israel. In 2020, dozens of the countrys foremost cultural groups raised concernsthat they could face charges of antisemitism over links real or perceived to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, known as B.D.S. Germanys Parliament has designated B.D.S. as antisemitic, and called on Germanys states, which provide the majority of arts funding in the country, to deny subsidies to groups or individuals that actively support the campaign.

Juergen Boos, the Frankfurt Book Fairs director, said in a statement that the organization strongly condemned Hamass 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 partiesin 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.

The event will be held from Oct. 18 to 22. Litprom said it is searching for a suitable format and setting to hold the award ceremony after the fair concludes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/books/frankfurt-book-fair-cancels-award-adania-shibli.html

Seems like in light of the attack by Hamas, there's this global push to portray Israel as 100% innocent and infallible, which is definitely not true.

Solar_Crimson posted...

Seems like in light of the attack by Hamas, there's this global push to portray Israel as 100% innocent and infallible, which is definitely not true.

The other end I think, a global push to demonize Palestine completely.

This feels awfully fascist.

voldothegr8 posted...

The other end I think, a global push to demonize Palestine completely.

6 of one, half a dozen of the other.

Recent events have made this book more relevant than ever, and it's cowardly of them to cancel this.