The Weekly Dispatch: On Sally Rooney | a new Gaza folio from Mizna | a new translation of May Ziadeh

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Starting last week, Sally Rooney’s books are no longer for sale in the United Kingdom. Rooney’s publisher, Faber, issued a statement on 14 October announcing that her books will no longer be available to purchase in the UK due to her support for Palestine Action, which remains proscribed as a terrorist organization by the UK government. Rooney pledged last year that she would be donating earnings from her books (and their adaptations) to support the group.

In a statement to The Bookseller, Rooney said: “In July 2025, the direct-action protest group Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK. The following month, I wrote an opinion piece expressing my intention to go on supporting Palestine Action, which is not a proscribed or otherwise prohibited group here in the Republic of Ireland.

“As a result, the fulfilment of contracts to publish my work in the UK could now constitute a serious criminal offence. After a process of consultation and deliberation, and with my full agreement, my publisher Faber has therefore determined that it can no longer supply my work within the UK.”

Hundreds of writers, including Patrick Ness, Chris Haughton, Damian Barr, and Juno Dawson, have issued an open letter in support of Rooney. “A country that bans its writers for speaking out is not a free country. If you ban Sally Rooney, you ban all of us.”

Ness told the Bookseller: "We believe this is a bigger issue than even Rooney and Palestine Action. If a government can proscribe an organisation and have this effect, who might future governments proscribe?"

The withdrawal of Rooney’s books from the UK is a principled act of refusal that builds on the successes of years of organizing in the literary world and comes just days ahead of the Supreme Court appeal hearing on November 4 and 5.

If you are a book worker interested in refusing complicity and thinking about how you might organise with co-workers and colleagues to exert institutional pressure please drop us a line on our new email address [email protected].

The journal Mizna has launched Take My Sorrow and Sew Me a Heart Its Size, a new bilingual anthology of writing and art from Palestinian artists from Gaza. Guest-edited by Yahya Ashour, the anthology holds a number of important pieces from writers in Gaza as well as Palestinian writers in diaspora who have roots in Gaza.

Yahya Ashour writes in his foreword that this project “is not a substitute for the full reality of what is happening in Gaza, nor does it attempt to resolve any so-called conflict in which the world has chosen to trap and crush us. The truth is as clear as the sun. It blinds those who are forever chasing proof or profit like a dog chasing a bone . . . These are texts that try to scream and expose everything, yet language collapses before them, unable to carry the weight.”

Find out more about the new Gaza folio here.

Help Akram’s Family Rebuild - a new crowdfunding appeal from Palestinian writer, Akram Al-Sourani. “I am writing to you from the heart of Gaza, among what remains of our home. We returned here after eight exhausting journeys of displacement. Today, we try to repair what little remains, covering holes in the walls and doing everything within our means to give our children some protection and privacy.”

Three New Poems – Three new poems by Taqwa Ahmed Alwawi: “Gaza is not a place. It is a throat that forgot how to swallow. Here, the sky falls, not as water, but as a question no once can answer.”

Every Grain of Sand Has Gallows: A Review of The Sleep Thief – Ilham Essalih reviews Ibtisam Azem’s novel The Sleep Thief as a surrealist dream-like novel that explores the reality-altering effects of everyday life as a Palestinian in Israel. 

Destruction of Gaza Court System Strips Women of Their Rights – Reporting from Gaza, Rasha Abou Jalal documents how Gazan women face seemingly insurmountable legal and bureaucratic obstacles to secure rights to inheritance, divorce, alimony, property and more.

How the Truth Survives in Gaza – Hassan Herzallah, who has been documenting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, writes that every time a witness is killed, another is there to take up their work. 

Ansam Abu Sitta’s ‘Behind the Walls’ – A short story from Ansam Abu Sitta’s collection Bench of the Reserves, translated by Nada Hodali: “Days passed as usual. No one knew what was going on behind the walls. No one saw the tyranny and cruelty of time, how it creatively tortured them and the way no one sensed it. How it simply slept at ease amongst their family members. And yet they were always present there, alone, behind the walls!” 

Settler Violence, Movement Restrictions Threaten West Bank Olive Harvest – Laila AlQaddumi documents how “escalating settler violence, military restrictions, and settlement expansion” are preventing olive farmers from accessing their land for the olive harvest. 

Who's Complicit? – An updated data visualization, by Visualizing Palestine, of companies that the UN has designated as complicit in business activities in illegal Israeli settlements. 

Disarming Resistance: The Trilateral Framework Agreement – Jaber Suleiman examines the trilateral agreement between the US, Israel, and Lebanon, to disarm Hezbollah, emphasizing its grave implications for the broader Palestinian struggle.

Three Years of Palestine Protest and Repression in Britain – Ibrahim Essad argues that the repressive crackdown on Palestine solidarity protests in Britain over the past three years has failed to stop the movement’s growth.

‘Could You Look and See if My House Is Still Standing?’ – Chris Osieck reflects on using open-source data to investigate and report on Gaza from afar, as a way of decentering the Israeli narrative about the finality of Gaza’s destruction.

In This West Bank Village, Israel Won’t Let Palestinians Visit Their Dead – Shatha Hammad reports on settler blockades of the cemetery of the village of Umm Safa as the latest in a series of escalations by settlers, backed by the Israeli army, to expel the Palestinians.

Witnessing Palestine: On Apartheid, Censorship, and the Counter-Archive – Allison Young examines questions of archival assertion and absence in the art world following 7 October 2023, emphasising the importance of recording, witnessing, and testifying to an ongoing genocide that is simultaneously hypervisible and invisible

In East Jerusalem, Palestinians Fight to Stay in Their Homes – Ananya Natchukuri writes about how Israeli settler groups are instrumentalizing legal tools to take over Palestinian homes. 

Burnham is Attacking Local Councils to Defend Israel – Tom Blackbuyrn argues that the Labour Party’s refusal to work with the Greens unless they renounce anti-Zionism exposes the hollowness of the Burnham project. 

A Reckoning With Civilization Itself: How the Genocide in Gaza Reshaped the Middle East – In this excerpt from his new book Twelve Days that Shook the Middle East, Marwan Bishara considers the impact of Israel’s war on the broader region: “The war on Gaza was not a war. It was a reckoning: a reckoning with civilization itself. As Gaza was reduced to ashes, the whole world watched—and turned away. Gaza wasn’t only destroyed. It was abandoned.”

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