Adania Shibli will deliver the first PEN Lecture on the eradication of Palestinian voices and the implications of these tolerated erasures.
Adania Shibli is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction. In her work she explores themes of power, abuse and freedom of language. As a Palestinian writer she has witnessed how Palestinian voices have been crushed by violence and systematically silenced on an unprecedented scale. In October 2023, Shibli made headlines when the Frankfurt book fair refused to give her the LiBeraturpreis because of the war in Gaza.
In the first annual PEN Nederland lecture, Adania Shibli will explore the how repetition of stories may allow their erasure and with them that of their tellers. This condition of our present times, to which testifies the tiring of stories about the annihilation of Palestinians alongside the killing of Palestinian journalists and writers is a witness, requires literature to be a field that revokes the limits erasure instils and formulates new words.
Taghreed El-Khodary, Maurits de Bruijn and Nadia Bouras will respond to her lecture. Djûke Poppinga will talk about the role of the translator.
About Adania Shibli
Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974, holds a PhD from the University of East London, and has published three novels in Arabic. Shibli’s latest book Minor Detail – a double-narration of a single crime story – is an extraordinary example of how literature changes the limitations of history writing. Her book is a meditation on war, violence, and narration, set in the Naqab desert during the summer of 1949, one year after the Nakba that led to the displacement and exile of more than 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape and kill her.
About PEN Nederland
PEN Nederland is committed to defending freedom of speech and expression for writers, poets, essayists, translators, critics, publishers, journalists, and screenwriters around the world. PEN Nederland was founded by P.C. Boutens on April 6, 1923, to promote international literary cooperation and to oppose censorship in any form.
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