Adania Shibli is a writer, she was born in Palestine. She has been writing novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays, which were published in various anthologies, art books, and literary and cultural magazines in different language. She has twice been awarded with the Qattan Young Writerʼs Award-Palestine in 2001 for her novel «Masaas» (En. «Touch», 2009), and in 2003 for her novel «Kulluna Ba’id bethat al Miqdar aan el-Hub» (En. «We Are All Equally Far from Love», 2012). As a co-curator of the symposium «A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialogue with Edward Said», which took place in 2013 in the House of World Cultures in Berlin, she invited artists and thinkers to reflect on the work and legacy of the literary theorist and critic Edward Said, and was the editor of a multimedia publication with the same title.
Shibli’s latest novel, «Tafsil Thanawi», (2017; En. »Minor Detail«, 2020) begins in the summer of 1949, one year after the «Nakba» (this word is used in Arabic to describe the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine in aftermath of the establishment of the state of Israel). Israeli soldiers capture a young Bedouin teenage girl, rape and kill her, and then bury her body in the sand. Many years later it is this «minor detail» that captivates a woman in Ramallah while stumbling across this story. «Tafsil Thanawi» is a reflection on language, war, violence, and the Palestinian experience of displacement and life under occupation. The book has been translated into more than forty languages and was nominated for the National Book Award (2020) and the International Booker Prize (2021).Her second novel, «Tamwīh» (2025), is about two young people in Palestine who are repeatedly pushed to the margins of existence by decades of occupation and the failed peace plans of the 1990s.
Shibli completed her PhD at the University of East London in Media and Cultural Studies, and she was a postdoctoral fellowship at the EUME c/o the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Shibli has taught at a number of institutions, including the University of Nottingham and the University of Birzeit. From 2022-2025 she acted a a co-curator of the Bergen Assembly 2025 in Bergen, Norway. Currently she divides her time between Berlin and Jerusalem.
Last Update: 2026
