The authors and translators longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize have been announced. Among them is Adania Shibli (CRF 2013), nominated for her book Minor Detail which was translated to English from its original Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette and was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
“Minor Detail revolves around a brutal crime committed during the War of 1948. Israeli soldiers rape a young Palestinian woman they find in the Negev desert, killing her and burying her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah embarks on a journey of discovery into the events surrounding that rape and murder. She becomes fascinated by it to the point of obsession when she reads about it by chance, not only because of its gruesome nature but also because it happened to take place 25 years to the day before she was born. The two sections of the book hover over one another like the maps the unnamed protagonist of the second section takes with her on her journey. The result is a haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, cutting 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 was born in Palestine in 1974. Her first two novels appeared in English with Clockroot Books as Touch (tr. Paula Haydar, 2010) and We Are All Equally Far From Love (tr. Paul Starkey, 2012). She was awarded the Young Writer’s Award by the A. M. Qattan Foundation in 2002 and 2004.”
For more on the Prize and to see the full longlist, click here.