By cancelling the ceremony for the literary prize awarded to Adania Shibli for her book “Minor Detail”, the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany has just demonstrated its low regard for culture and literature. This last-minute change is attributable to “the war in Israel”. For the same reason, there will be “additional moments onstage for Israeli voices”, announced Juergen Boos, director of the event.

Confusing a Palestinian writer with Hamas fighters is a rare stupidity, a dangerous amalgam. We encourage our readers to discover Adania Shibli’s sensitive prose in the articles she wrote for our website over a decade ago.

What is the story told in this tale that has suddenly become so disturbing?

“In 2003, we read in babelio, Haaretz, an Israeli daily newspaper, revealed that in August 1949, soldiers had kidnapped, gang-raped, then killed and buried a young Bedouin woman in the Negev. It was a crime in keeping with the massacres committed at that pivotal time to terrify what remained of the inhabitants of this desert area.

Seventy years later, Adania Shibli writes about this “incident” in a story that is divided into two very different parts.

The first part tells the story of the crime with almost surgical objectivity. It features two main characters: an anonymous Israeli officer, a maniac for order and hygiene, who invades the pages with his hypnotic presence, and his victim, who, like him, is never named. The second part is narrated in the first person, in a highly subjective and ironic tone, by a modern-day Palestinian woman who is obsessed by a “minor detail” of the incident: the fact that it happened twenty-five years to the day before she was born.

Defying the obstacles imposed by the occupying forces, she manages to travel to the Negev in the hope of unearthing the victim’s hidden story. But the aspiring detective soon finds herself going in circles...

Long in the making, this scathing novel, beyond the Israeli-Palestinian context, denounces rape as a banal weapon of war in just a few pages, and takes a subtle look at the interplay of memory and forgetting.”

Translated and published in German in 2022, the book won the prestigious LiBeraturpreis, awarded annually at an ad hoc ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The cancellation of the award ceremony for Adania Shibli and the statements made by Juergen Boos, who at no point referred to the civilians who died in the Gaza bombardments, led to protests from Arab publishers and authors. Outraged, several of them have already announced that they are withdrawing their participation from the Frankfurt event.

The British Fitzcarraldo Editions, which published the English version, declared on Twitter its full solidarity with the writer and announced on social media that for the duration of the Book Fair, the ebook "Minor Detail" will be available free of charge. La nave di Teseo, which published the Italian translation of the book, also launched an appeal to publishers around the world asking them not to censor Adania Shibli.

Translated from Frech by Elizabeth Grech