Critical Cabaret:
Adania Shibli

Palestinian author Adania Shibli, a defining literary and intellectual voice of our time, joins philosopher Srećko Horvat for a conversation on literature, memory, violence, and the politics of narration.

Shibli is the author of the celebrated novels Touch, We Are All Equally Far from Love, and Minor Detail, the latter shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and widely praised for its unsettling exploration of historical erasure, colonial violence, and the fragile conditions of narration. Her writing moves through silence, absence, intimacy, and fear, revealing how occupation enters language, bodies, landscapes, and everyday life.

Alongside her literary work, Shibli has also developed an important academic and intellectual practice while teaching at Birzeit University in Palestine and engaging in questions of aesthetics, ethics, language, and coloniality across both fiction and critical thought. Her work persistently challenges the limits of representation, exploring fragmentation, narrative displacement, and the politics of form in relation to violence and history.

The discussion will focus on the themes emerging from Shibli’s writing: displacement, archival violence, invisibility, and the struggle over memory, language, and perception itself. Moving between literature and political thought, Shibli and Horvat will reflect on what storytelling can still make possible in a time marked by war, censorship, and mass destruction. 

With a new novel forthcoming this autumn, the Ljubljana conversation will also offer an unique opportunity to reflect on the new directions, questions, and forms emerging in Shibli’s latest work.