Tuesday 29th October
6.30-9pm
Join us for an evening with the author Adania Shibli, to discuss her novel Minor Detail with Dr. Nora Parr.
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.
Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974. Her first two novels appeared in English with Clockroot Books 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. Minor Detail was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.
Dr. Nora Parr works on Arabic and Palestinian literature. Beyond reading and translating Palestinian fiction, she is part of a small collective housing testimony of daily life in Gaza since October 7, and works with the Palestine Trauma Center to understand how grassroots approaches to mental health shift the script on our understanding of psychological harm and its repair. She serves as co-Editor at the journal of Middle Eastern Literatures, her first monograph Novel Palestine: Nation through the works of Ibrahim Nasrallah came out in 2023 with the University of California Press, and her writing on Adania Shibli's Minor Detail will come out in Teaching Literature Politically (Eds May Hawwas and Bruce Robbins, 2025) from Fordham University Press. Her translation of Shibli's "Mathematics, under Which Is Love, Whose Bed Is Language" came out in The Paris Review (2021).