After her debut book, Conversations with Friends, was published in 2017, Irish novelist Sally Rooney gave an interview in which she spoke about the novel’s themes of class, interpersonal power, and privilege. “People, particularly older wealthy people,” she said, “do not take the radical views of young women seriously.”
Since that prescient interview, much has changed. Rooney sold millions of books, adapted two of her novels into wildly popular mini-series, and made sure the radical views of young women, such as herself, were not just taken seriously but were bona fide and impossible to ignore. The author denounced Israel’s genocide in Gaza, was vocal in her support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, refused to publish her latest two books in Hebrew with an Israeli publisher tied to the military, and pledged her support for Palestine Action by donating the royalties from her work to the proscribed group (The UK proscribed the group as a terrorist organization in 2025 and the U.S. followed with the label and sanctions this year).
Let us be clear: Palestine Action, whose stated aims are to stop Israeli war crimes and British complicity in them by disrupting the production of weapons, mainly Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms company, is not a terrorist group. It was the government of Keir ‘Israel has a legal right to cut water and electricity to Palestinians’ Starmer, laughably, a former human rights lawyer, that proscribed it under the UK Terrorism Act 2000, placing it on the same footing as al-Qaeda. By pledging her earnings to Palestine Action, Rooney placed herself at risk of arrest if she enters the UK. Now, her publishers can’t pay her for her work, and she’s been forced to withdraw all her books from sale in the UK. It is an extraordinary act of Orwellian villainy, censorship, and oppression by the UK. If they can shut down one of the most popular writers of her time, what other line won’t they cross?