Pulitzer and Booker Prize Winners Call for Israeli Boycott

Pulitzer and Booker prize winners recently led the call for global cultural institutions to boycott Israeli cultural institutions. 

More than 1,000 authors, publishers, and artists from around the world signed an open letter expressing solidarity with the Palestinians in the ongoing war in Gaza. 

The following authors have signed the letter:

• American-Libyan novelist Hisham Matar won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography 'The Return'.
• Percival Everett whose novels 'The Trees' and 'James' were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. 
• Sally Rooney whose novels 'Conversations with Friends' and 'Normal People' were adapted to hit television series.

• Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel 'The Sympathizer'.
• Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her novel 'The God of Small Things'.
• Mohsin Hamid is known for his authors 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' and 'Exit West'.
• Avni Doshi's novel 'Burnt Sugar' was nominated for the 'Booker Prize'.

The letter states, "The overwhelming injustice faced by the Palestinians cannot be denied. The current war has entered our homes and pierced our hearts...This is a genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for months ... Israeli officials speak plainly of their motivations to eliminate the population of Gaza, to make Palestinian statehood impossible, and to seize Palestinian land."

The annual Palestine Festival of Literature organized the campaign first and were later joined by Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, and Fossil Free Books.

Many authors who have ties to the region have signed the letter including Palestinian author and human rights activist Susan Abulhawa, Lebanese author Hanan Al-Shaykh, Sudanese-Scottish novelist Leila Aboulela, and Palestinian writer and activist Mohammed El-Kurd. 

This open letter is one of the largest campaigns from the industry calling to boycott Israeli cultural institutions.

The letter reads, "We have a role to play. We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement."

The text emphasizes that the signed authors will not work with Israeli cultural institutions, institutions, publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights...justifying Israel's occupation, apartheid or genocide, or have never publicly recognised the rights of the Palestinian people".

The open letter ends with a call to other writers and workers in the publishing industry to sign the letter. 

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