An extract from the second part of Adania Shibli's novel "Minor Detail", a haunting meditation on war, violence and memory that 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.

Adania Shibli, who divides her time between Berlin and Jerusalem, was due on 20 October to be awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, an annual prize given to women writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world. On Friday, however, the LitProm association that hands out the prize announced it would postpone the award ceremony “due to the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering”. In its original announcement, LitProm said it had taken the step to postpone the award as a “joint decision” with the author. But Shibli’s literary agency responded that the decision was not made with her consent, and that if the ceremony had been held she would have taken the opportunity to reflect on the role of literature in these painful times. An open letter, signed by more than 350 authors admonished the organisers of the Frankfurt book fair, the world’s largest trade fair of its kind, saying it has “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”.

Translation from Arabic: Elisabeth Jaquette
Voices: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni