British-Pakistani author and novelist Kamila Shamsie has been stripped off literary award by Germany for her pro-Palestinian activism.
Earlier, this month she was announced as the winner of the Nelly Sachs Prize, named after the German-Jewish Nobel laureate and awarded by the city of Dortmund to a writer promoting “tolerance and reconciliation.
The six-member jury, however, reversed their decision on Wednesday to honour Shamsie saying no author will receive the award this year and the next winner will be announced in 2021.
“With its vote for the British writer Kamila Shamsie as the winner of the Nelly Sachs Prize 2019, the jury honoured the author’s outstanding literary work,” reads the statement.
“At that time, despite prior research, the members of the jury were not aware that the author has been participating in the boycott measures against the Israeli government for its Palestinian policies since 2014.”
“Shamsie’s political positioning to actively participate in the cultural boycott as part of the BDS campaign… is clearly in contradiction to the statutory objectives of the award,” added the jury.
Shamsie condemned the decision and said she will not allow her work to be published in Israel. “It is a matter of great sadness that a jury should bow to pressure and withdraw a prize from a writer who is exercising her freedom of conscience and freedom of expression”.
She described it as a “matter of outrage that the BDS movement (modelled on the South African boycott) that campaigns against the government of Israel for its acts of discrimination and brutality against Palestinians should be held up as something shameful and unjust”.
The BDS movement is a Palestine-led campaign promoting various forms of boycott against Israel to put pressure on it for respecting human rights in Palestine.
The award-winning author who moved to London from Karachi bagged the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018 and her seventh novel, Home Fire, was longlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize.
