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Sally Rooney: Supported boycott of Israel in several open letters
Photo: Erik Voake / Getty Images
The Irish writer Sally Rooney is currently one of the best-known young authors worldwide: In 2018, she was already on the longlist of the Man Booker Prize for her novel “Conversations with Friends”.
The title has been translated into a dozen languages.
Her new title "Beautiful World, Where Are You" was published in September - the German version "Schöne Welt, where are you" followed in the same month.
However, it has now been announced that Rooney does not want to have her book published by any Israeli publisher.
This means that the book will not be translated into Hebrew for the time being.
The Israeli publisher Modan had sent an inquiry to the author.
But Rooney refused.
According to information from the British newspaper "The Guardian", Rooney justified her decision in a statement: She was "very proud" that her earlier novels were translated into Hebrew.
But you have "initially decided not to sell these translation rights to an Israeli publisher."
The author refers to a report by the organization Human Rights Watch: It shows that Israel's "system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians" corresponds to the "definition of apartheid under international law".
The rights to the Hebrew translation of her new novel are "still available," said Rooney.
However, they will only sell them if the trade is "compatible with the guidelines of the BDS movement on institutional boycotts."
BDS stands for »Boycott, Divest, Sanction« and is a boycott campaign against the State of Israel.
According to information from the Israeli daily »Haaretz«, a spokeswoman had previously told Modan that the author supported a »cultural boycott« of Israel and therefore did not allow a Hebrew translation of her new novel.
In response to inquiries from the British daily newspaper »Daily Telegraph«, a publisher's spokesman confirmed the rejection.
However, Modan did not comment on whether the grounds referred to a boycott of Israel.
Solidarity with Kamila Shamsie
According to the Israeli newspaper Mako, such a decision would not come "out of nowhere": Two years ago Rooney expressed his solidarity with the Pakistani-British writer Kamila Shamsie in an open letter.
Shamsie was stripped of the Nelly Sachs Prize after her sympathy for the controversial Israel boycott movement BDS became public.
In May 2021, Rooney signed another open letter in which Palestinian artists spoke out against Israeli settlement policy.
At the end of last year, more than a thousand artists and intellectuals in Germany spoke out against the Bundestag's anti-BDS resolution in a public statement at the end of 2020.
With the resolution, the movement was classified as anti-Semitic.
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