TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the book “Minor Detail” written by the Palestinian author Adania Shibli has been released in bookstores across Iran.

Qoqnoos Publishing House has published the book in 111 pages with a translation by Sara Mostafapur, Mehr reported.

A 2017 novel, “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. 

The book has two parts, the first recalling a true story of a 1949 gang rape and murder of a young Arab Bedouin-Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers, and in the second part, telling of a fictional modern-day account of the life of a Palestinian woman in Ramallah who tries to investigate this incident. Her investigation is made difficult by the travel restrictions faced by the Palestinians. Eventually, having violated the travel restrictions, she is executed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the same spot as the Bedouin girl.

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.

The novel was nominated for a National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020, longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021, and won the LiBeraturpreis [de] in 2023.

Adania Shibli, 50, is a Palestinian author and essayist. She is mainly known for the 2020 translation of her novel “Minor Detail” into English, German, and other languages, and for a public controversy in Germany following the cancellation of a literary prize for this book, originally scheduled for the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair.

She holds a Ph.D. from the University of East London in Media and Cultural Studies. Shibli has taught at the University of Nottingham and since 2013 has worked as a part-time professor at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine.

Since 1996, Shibli has published in various literary magazines in Europe and the Middle East. Further, she has expanded her work to include novels, plays, short stories, and narrative essays, published in several languages in anthologies, art books, and literary and cultural magazines.

Shibli and her children split their time between Jerusalem and Berlin. Shibli speaks Arabic, English, Hebrew, French, Korean, and German.

SS/SAB