Prose, politics, and Palestine are no foreign concepts to the infamous Irish author Sally Rooney. In her 2018 novel Normal People, Marianne and Connell attended a protest, supporting Gaza during Israel’s 2014 bombing campaign. In 2021, Rooney faced backlash, refusing to sell the publication rights and Hebrew translation to an Israeli company for Beautiful World, Where Are You. In 2025, she published an opinion piece in The Irish Times, voicing her support for Palestine Action, a proscribed terrorist group in the UK. Now, a year later, her books are being taken off shelves for her alignment with Palestine Action.
While her work is not formally banned, Rooney will not receive any income for her work sold in the UK. Faber, her publisher, described to the BBC that “to sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation.”
Rooney had considered this possibility, as in her 2025 piece she wrote that “my books, at least for now, are still published in Britain”. While she maintains in her BBC statement that she is “wholly prepared to accept the consequences,” as readers, students and people of the UK, it is inconceivable to witness censorship happen in real time.
In our descent towards fascism, the boundaries of what we find acceptable are pushed further and further, with literature and the arts being no exception. Locally, 90 degree programmes are to be cut next year at the University of Edinburgh, all within the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Globally, AI seeps into our conversations, cinema, fine arts, music, and minds, all without our consent in the name of profit and convenience, but to whom exactly?
This is our present predicament, three years into a genocide with no decided action from global crime and justice institutions. Regardless of whether people agree with Rooney’s political opinions, censorship rids the public of accessing and critically analysing literature for themselves, unconsciously stripping a person of their right to read and intellectual autonomy.
Rooney’s suppression in the UK also speaks to the well-known hypocrisy towards radical women. Over her nine-year career as a novelist, with six million books sold and two internationally beloved TV adaptations which have consistently been political in nature, it once again seems shocking that the woman with strong political beliefs has strong political beliefs.
After three years of Palestinian schools, universities, libraries and teaching hospitals being destroyed, Rooney put it best last year in the Irish Times: “we owe the people of Palestine more than mere words.”
Photo by Olivia Laughton for The Student.
