The Frankfurt Book Fair, which begins this week, found itself at the heart of controversy on Monday following the postponement of an awards ceremony planned for Adania Shibli, a Palestinian author due to the war between Israel and Hamas. She was to receive this prize for her novel A Minor Detail, which recounts a rape and murder perpetrated by Israeli soldiers in 1949.
More than 600 personalities from the world of literature and publishing published an open letter of protest against this decision on Monday. Among the signatories of the letter are the Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah and the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, both winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and other writers including the Congolese Emmanuel Dongala and the Canadian Naomi Klein, according to the letter obtained by AFP. The organizers “close the space to a Palestinian voice,” deplore the signatories of the letter. “The Frankfurt Book Fair has the responsibility to create spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings and reflections on literature in these terrible and cruel times, without closing them,” the text adds.
Several Arab publishing groups have also announced that they intend to boycott the show which takes place from Wednesday to Sunday. Among them is the Sharjah Book Authority, a publishing house in the United Arab Emirates, which has indicated that it wants to defend “the role of culture and books in encouraging dialogue and understanding between people”
The Litprom association, which promotes foreign authors in the German language and awards a literary prize, the LiBeraturpreis, announced Friday that this year’s winner, Adania Shibli, would not receive hers at the fair as had initially been planned. After Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on October 7, the deadliest in the history of the Jewish state, the association condemned this “barbaric” act and declared that Israeli voices would be highlighted at the show of the book.
But she also decided not to organize this year’s ceremony for the prize given to Ms. Shibli “because of the war started by Hamas”, while seeking “an appropriate format and framework for the event at a later time “.
