IN CONVERSATION: ADANIA SHIBLI
19/06/2025 (Thursday)
19:00h
The National Library of Kosovo "Pjetër Bogdani"
Moderated by Diona Budima
For the next event of our ‘In Conversation’ series, we are delighted to welcome acclaimed Palestinian author Adania Shibli to Prishtina for the very first time. Shibli will be 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 will focus 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. Minor Detail has been recently translated into Albanian as Një detaj dytësor by Isa Memishi and published by Dudaj Publishing (Tiranë). The event will also serve as a celebration of the Albanian translation and the discussion will be followed by a book signing session with the author.
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts 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.
— Fitzcarraldo Editions
Times Books of the Year 2020
‘An extraordinary work of art, Minor Detail is continuously surprising and absorbing: a very rare blend of moral intelligence, political passion and formal virtuosity.’
— Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger
‘Adania Shibli takes a gamble in entrusting our access to the key event in her novel – the rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman – to two profoundly self-absorbed narrators – an Israeli psychopath and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale – but her method of indirection justifies itself fully as the book reaches its heart-stopping conclusion.’
— J. M. Coetzee, 2003 Nobel Prize-winner
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 Jacquette, 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.