Arnon Grunberg meets Adania Shibli

Arnon Grunberg speaks with Palestine’s most prominent writer, Adania Shibli. What role can fiction still bear amidst the ongoing Nakba and its acceleration in recent years?

In Adania Shibli’s new novel Misleiding (Deception), a young woman and a young man are violently pushed ever further to the edge of existence. There is no mention of places or dates; only the seasons change. After decades of colonisation, military occupation and the failed peace plans of the 1990s, their lives are maimed and driven apart, and their dreams slowly fade.

With razor-sharp, minimalist prose, Shibli lays bare the constant threat of subjugation, arrest and land confiscation, and the relentless effort to turn Palestinians into strangers in their own land. What she maintains unwritten weighs as heavily as what she writes.

This evening, Adania Shibli and Arnon Grunberg pick up after their conversation in 2023. Shibli is a writer who has long explored power, narrative complicity and the vulnerability of the individual and language. How to narrate what can’t be put into words? What role can fiction still bear amidst the ongoing Nakba and its acceleration in recent years?