Adania Shibli
Minor Detail
Acclaimed Palestinian author Adania Shibli was joined by literary scholar Diona Budima for a conversation about the minor details of history, the limits of grand narratives, and the incommensurability between the experience of the colonised and the boundaries of the archive. The discussion focused on Shibli’s novel Minor Detail (tr. Elisabeth Jaquette), shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020 and longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. The event also served as a celebration of the translation of Minor Detail into Albanian, translated as Një detaj dytësor by Isa Memishi and published by Dudaj Publishing.
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Programme
In Conversation
Project Lead
Participants
Diona Budima
Themes
The video documentation of the talk is accessible for educational and non-commercial purposes only in the territories of Kosovo and Albania. For access, please contact us at heritagespace@chwbkosova.org with your request.
“...You witness history through a change of words. Words that were once something, and then become something else. And in this transformation, this travel through time, there is a lot that is not registered in history books. It's what we carry in our bodies. It’s an embodied experience. And this is what I think of as poetic experience. It is something that you cannot put in scientific language. It emerges when history and truth cannot reach, cannot articulate. And I think, okay, are history and truth lost when they are not told? No, they are not lost. They exist somewhere. I always go back to Aimé Césaire’s idea of poetic knowledge: nothing is lost. It just becomes a different kind of knowledge… And I think literature allows this poetic knowledge to emerge.”
Adania Shibli is a writer of novels, short stories, plays, and essays. Her first two novels appeared in English 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. Her last novel, Minor Detail, translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette, was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020 and longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.
Diona Budima is a researcher, writer, and editor, whose work spans comparative literature, critical theory and psychoanalysis. Most recently, her research has focused on Flaubert and transformations of the notion of writing in 19th century French realism. Diona lives in Prishtina.