The Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo has called for renewed efforts to diversify the school curriculum in England, warning that young people are growing up in a society where “doors are closing” and the tide is turning against inclusion.

There has been progress in the diversity of texts on offer in the GCSE English literature curriculum, but uptake in schools is still low with just 1.9% of GCSE pupils in England studying books by authors of colour, up from 0.7% five years ago, according to a report.

Compiled by the campaign group Lit in Colour, the report says progress is too slow and that at the current pace of change it will be 2046 before 10% of students answer a question about a text by an author of colour in their English literature GCSE.

And it will take until 2115 before 38% of pupils study a writer of colour in GCSE English literature, a figure that is significant because according to the Department for Education’s (DfE) most recent figures, 38% of pupils in English schools are from a minority ethnic background.

Since Lit in Colour launched its campaign to improve diversity in the school curriculum in England five years ago, the proportion of GCSE English literature set texts by authors of colour has increased from 12% to 36%.

In 2025 there were eight texts by authors of colour on exam board set text lists, mostly of Black and south Asian heritage, but many teachers continue to offer texts such as JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, because of familiarity, a lack of resources to support the teaching of new texts and insufficient time for training.

Writing in the foreword to the campaign’s five-year progress report, Evaristo welcomed the progress made but said that with the concept of diversity under attack, it was even more important to ensure books by writers of colour were on the curriculum.

After the murder of George Floyd in the US and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK, Evaristo said, “there was a noticeable willingness from many institutions to explore some of the barriers people of colour have had to face, including in the education sector”.

She said: “Fast forward to 2025 and it seems as if those doors are closing again, and I worry that young people today are once again growing up in a society where attempts to become more egalitarian are under threat, with the tide turning against inclusion.

“The term ‘diversity’ itself is now considered a dangerous concept in some quarters, with all attempts at becoming a more progressive society dismissed as ‘woke’. In this climate, the Lit in Colour campaign is even more essential to ensuring that books by authors of colour are on the curriculum.”

Lit in Colour, led by Penguin Random House and the Runnymede Trust thinktank on race equality and race relations, is a partnership between educational and cultural organisations and England’s four exam boards.

A spokesperson for the Department for Education said: “As part of the government’s response to the curriculum and assessment review we will ensure that alongside classic English literature the curriculum will allow space for teachers to choose a wider range of texts and authors.”

Meanwhile, Lee Child, the bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series of thrillers, has been named as the first prison reading laureate. The role, which covers prisons in England and Wales, has been created to highlight the importance of improving literacy among prisoners to help prevent reoffending.

Child plans to expand a literacy pilot programme he has been running in a number of prisons and will be inviting more authors to participate.

“This isn’t about being soft on crime, it’s about being smart,” he said. “Improving literacy is an evidence-based, practical approach that works. When people leave prison better equipped to read and learn, they’re less likely to reoffend. That makes communities safer for everyone.”

The new one-year role has been created as part of the National Year of Reading, a UK-wide campaign to boost reading among children and adults.

Richard Osman, Kate Mosse and Sir Philip Pullman are among authors calling for all babies to automatically receive a library card at birth. The proposal, put forward by the thinktank Cultural Policy Unit (CPU), aims to make public library membership a national birthright and encourage a culture of reading and learning in the early stages of childhood through a National Library Card.

“The idea behind a National Library Card is very simple,” Alison Cole, director at the CPU, said. “Access to knowledge and culture should be a birthright, not a postcode lottery. By giving every child an automatic library card from birth, together with a programme of activities and engagement, we make libraries part of the fabric of everyday life.”

A November report by the National Literacy Trust found a socioeconomic gap in book ownership. “Far fewer” children and young people who receive free school meals report having a book of their own compared with their peers, making public libraries that offer free access to books crucial for tackling social inequality.

Public libraries are “engines of social mobility with a critical role in supporting children and families from birth”, said Isobel Hunter, chief executive of Libraries Connected. She added that investment is key, and offers long-term benefits to closing opportunity gaps in communities.

“Reading from the earliest days supports bonding, tackles inequalities, and boosts development,” added Annie Crombie, co-CEO of BookTrust.

Author Kate Mosse said that universal access to local libraries “will make an enormous difference to young parents who maybe don’t have a support network near them”.

Cole added that the “support of authors like Richard Osman and Kate Mosse really matters, as does Sir Philip Pullman’s enthusiasm for a policy that is full of optimism. They understand better than anyone that readers are made early, and that libraries are where curiosity, confidence – as well as a love of stories – begins. Their backing reflects a growing consensus that if we’re serious about literacy and social mobility, we have to start from birth – and libraries are a place of infinite possibilities.”

The National Library Card initiative would also help teach children how to confidently navigate an increasingly digital world in an era of artificial intelligence, said the CPU. It has incorporated a library journey timeline in its proposal that includes suggestions of services for stages of child development, from birth to 18 years, to ensure that libraries are “lifelong tools for learning, creativity, cultural experiences and social mobility”.

Three hundred and eighty writers and organisations including Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Russell T Davies, Hanif Kureishi, Frank Cottrell-Boyce and George Monbiot have signed a letter stating that the Israeli government’s war in Gaza is genocidal and calling for an immediate ceasefire.

“The use of the words ‘genocide’ or ‘acts of genocide’ to describe what is happening in Gaza is no longer debated by international legal experts or human rights organizations,” reads the letter, which was also signed by William Dalrymple, Jeanette Winterson, Brian Eno, Kate Mosse, Irvine Welsh and Elif Shafak.

Organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations human rights council have “clearly identified” acts of genocide enacted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), the letter says, while public statements by the Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir “openly express genocidal intentions”.

The writers call for the immediate unrestricted distribution of food and medical aid in Gaza by the UN and a ceasefire “which guarantees safety and justice for all Palestinians, the release of all Israeli hostages, and the release of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners arbitrarily held in Israeli jails”. If the Israeli government does not heed calls for an immediate ceasefire, sanctions should be imposed, they say.

The writers Horatio Clare, Kapka Kassabova and Monique Roffey organised the letter, with input from a dozen British writers, basing the text on an original published in Liberation on Monday evening, and signed by 300 Francophone writers.

It opens with a poem, titled A Star Said Yesterday, by the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in October 2023. “And if one day, O Light / All the galaxies / Of the entire universe / Had no more room for us / You would say: ‘Enter my heart, / There you will finally be safe.’” In the poem, Abu Nada “imagined for the people of Gaza a cosmic refuge – something utterly unlike the constant lethal danger they now face”, reads the letter.

The letter goes on to say that Palestinians “are not the abstract victims of an abstract war. Too often, words have been used to justify the unjustifiable, deny the undeniable, defend the indefensible. Too often, too, the right words – the ones that mattered – have been eradicated, along with those who might have written them.”

The term “genocide” “is not a slogan”, it adds. “It carries legal, political, and moral responsibilities.”

The letter quotes a recent statement published by the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, which says: “While states debate terminology – is it or is it not genocide? – Israel continues its relentless destruction of life in Gaza, through attacks by land, air and sea, displacing and massacring the surviving population with impunity.”

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said previously that “the charge of genocide levelled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people everywhere should reject it”.

More than 53,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since 7 October 2023, according to the Gaza health ministry. More than 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led attack on Israel.

“Just as it is true to call the atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent civilians on 7 October 2023 crimes of war and crimes against humanity, so today it is true to name the attack on the people of Gaza an atrocity of genocide,” the letter states.

“We refuse to be a public of bystander-approvers,” it continues. “This is not only about our common humanity and all human rights; this is about our moral fitness as the writers of our time, which diminishes with every day we refuse to speak out and denounce this crime.

“In taking this stand, we assert without reservation our absolute opposition to and loathing of antisemitism, of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli prejudice. We reject and abhor attacks, hate and violence – in writing, speech and action – against Palestinian, Israeli, and Jewish people in all and any form. We stand in solidarity with the resistance of Palestinian, Jewish, and Israeli people to the genocidal policies of the current Israeli government.”

Other signatories include Scottish Pen, Jonathan Coe, Susie Orbach, Kevin Barry, Benjamin Myers, Andrew O’Hagan, Sarah Bernstein, Philip Marsden, Fiammetta Rocco, Lucy Jones, Monique Roffey, India Knight, Nick Laird, Nina Stibbe, Seán Hewitt, Xiaolu Guo, Chris Power, Joe Dunthorne and Marina Warner.

“This genocide implicates us all,” the letter concludes. “We bear witness to the crimes of genocide, and we refuse to approve them by our silence.”

Sally Rooney, Arundhati Roy and Rachel Kushner are among more than 1,000 writers and publishing professionals who have signed a letter pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians”.

Signatories to the pledge say they will not work with Israeli publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights”, including operating “discriminatory policies and practices” or “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide”.

Institutions that have never publicly recognised the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law” will also be boycotted.

The campaign was organised by the Palestine festival of literature (also known as PalFest), which runs an annual festival with free public events in cities across Palestine, alongside campaign groups Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Publishers for Palestine, Writers Against the War on Gaza and Fossil Free Books.

“We, as writers, publishers, literary festival workers, and other book workers, publish this letter as we face the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century,” begins the statement, which goes on to say that Israel has killed “at the very least 43,362” Palestinians in Gaza since last October, and that this follows “75 years of displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid”.

Culture “has played an integral role in normalising these injustices”, it says. Israeli cultural institutions, “often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades”.

Industry workers have a “role to play”, states the pledge. “We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” it reads, noting that “countless authors” took the same position against apartheid in South Africa.The letter ends with a call to the signatories’ peers to join the pledge.

In response to the letter, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), an association of lawyers supporting Israel, has sent its own letter to the Society of Authors, the Publishers Association and the Independent Publishers Guild. “This boycott is plainly discriminatory against Israelis. The authors do not impose similar conditions on publishers, festivals, literary agencies or publications of any other nationality,” the UKLFI alleged, adding that its members believe there are legal risks involved in participating in the boycott.

Omar Robert Hamilton, co-founder and current festival director of PalFest, said he believes the UKLFI’s letter “is only notable for its moral bankruptcy and proves that Israel’s apologists have nothing to say.”

Rooney, the author of Normal People and, most recently, Intermezzo, has long been an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, and in 2021 refused to sell the Hebrew translation rights of her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, to an Israeli publisher.

Roy and Kushner are also vocal critics of Israel. Upon accepting the PEN Pinter prize earlier this month, Roy used her speech to discuss Gaza, and said that she would donate her prize money to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

In August 2021, Britain’s last ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Laurie Bristow, climbed on to a table holding a kitchen knife. He and a member of his security team had a small but important task. They unscrewed a portrait of the queen from the wall. Around them was “incessant gunfire”. Some of it came from heavy calibre weapons. A large TV screen nearby relayed the news on a loop. It was grim. The Taliban were at the gates of Kabul.

From time to time, Bristow recalls, there were great crashes from the roof as soldiers destroyed sensitive equipment. The UK was shutting its embassy and relocating to a military facility inside Kabul airport. Soon, soldiers and diplomats would depart. The US-led campaign in Afghanistan – a 20-year saga of wishful thinking and blunders – was ending in ignominy and farce. And, as Bristow describes in his compelling memoir Kabul: Final Call, with betrayal and human disaster.

The previous week, the Taliban had overrun a series of provincial capitals. Afghanistan’s foreign-backed republic was falling apart. That might have been predicted. In February 2020, Donald Trump announced the US was pulling its forces out. The Biden administration stuck to this decision and gave a deadline of September 2021 for the exit of Nato troops. Afghanistan’s government, many thought, might stagger on until Christmas.

Bristow arrived in Kabul in June 2021, as Afghanistan’s future looked precarious. He understood it might fall to him to shutter the embassy and evacuate staff, as well as Afghans who worked with British forces. What nobody had anticipated was the speed with which the situation unravelled. The Taliban – chased out in 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11 – controlled rural areas and key roads. In nine giddy days they reconquered the entire country.

What went wrong? As Bristow tells it, the west failed because of bad strategy and a loss of will. After the attacks on the twin towers, a military response from the US and its allies was inevitable. Its goal: to exterminate al-Qaeda. As a young reporter, I watched the Taliban’s northern army surrender outside Mazar-i-Sharif. The five-year-old emirate ended in “a wilderness of shimmering desert and telegraph poles”, I wrote in 2001. It was “vanishing into history”.

This prediction turned out to be wrong. After a period in Pakistan’s tribal regions, the Taliban returned. They waged a brutal and increasingly effective insurgency against international and Afghanistan government troops. The conflict cost billions. Meanwhile, George Bush’s administration invaded Iraq. A surge by the next US president, Barack Obama, didn’t bring results. By 2021, the public had lost interest in Afghanistan, seeing it as a for ever war with few benefits.

Washington and London’s mistake, in Bristow’s view, was to seek a military solution to what was a political problem. The international coalition also failed to address the “egregious” behaviour of its Afghan allies. Bristow portrays Afghanistan’s then president, Ashraf Ghani, as an aloof academic, surrounded by toadies. As the Taliban closed in, he gave speeches from his fortified Arg palace about digital governance. Afghanistan’s then defence minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, was more clear-eyed; the Taliban tried to murder him. Overall, Afghanistan’s ministers were a corrupt and predatory bunch, beset by factional squabbles.

Bristow is frank about his frustrations in dealing with Whitehall. Some Afghans qualified for resettlement in the UK. But who exactly should make the cut? And what about dependants? The ambassador said he urged the Home Office and Ministry of Defence to speed up the processing of applications, including from his embassy team. Instead of stepping up, officials accused him of “catastrophising”. “I ignored this,” he writes.

As the situation got worse, Bristow received media requests for interviews. He relayed these to special advisers working for then foreign secretary Dominic Raab. There was no reply. When Kabul fell, Raab was on holiday to Crete. Other senior mandarins were missing. Bristow doesn’t say much about the infamous campaign allegedly involving former prime minister Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie, to rescue Afghan cats and dogs. But he notes that “the priority of some in London” was to spare senior figures from “embarrassment”.

Kabul: Final Call is full of glorious details. Bristow was previously ambassador to Moscow. He swapped a 19th-century mansion overlooking the Kremlin for a Barratt Homes-like residence in Kabul. It had a shiny grand piano and a garden with a small lawn and mynah birds. Before flying out, Bristow picked up a flak jacket and helmet. During security alerts, he took cover in a sweaty armoured “wardrobe” and leafed through a back number of the Economist.

In the run-up to Kabul’s fall, there were numerous ominous signs. Rockets thudded into the green zone. The French ambassador sent home his chef. After relocating to the airport, Bristow found himself in a “real-life” version of Apocalypse Now, as desperate Afghans tried to board a plane. Thousands besieged the perimeter. The Baron hotel – used by the UK as an evacuation handling centre – became a chaotic refugee camp. He spoke to Downing Street from a laptop propped up on the bar.

In contrast to his masters in Westminster, Bristow comes across as decent, serious, analytical and quietly heroic: a brave public servant doing a tough job. He pays tribute to the young British soldiers sent to guard the airport’s gates. And to his staff, who had to inform Afghan families they did not qualify for evacuation. “You are told in return that you are condemning them to death,” he recalls. It was a harrowing experience, he writes, that haunted those involved.

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Some hoped the Taliban who seized Kabul in 2021 might be more moderate than their hardline predecessors. This, it turned out, was a delusion. The Afghans, by the Norwegian writer and journalist Åsne Seierstad, tells the story of what happened next, after the last flights carrying Bristow and his US counterparts took off. She traces the lives of three Afghans: a Taliban commander, a young female law student and a prominent women’s rights activist.

Despite earlier assurances, the Taliban closed down girls’ secondary schools, banned women from the workplace and ordered them to cover up. They were forbidden from travelling farther than 45 miles (72kms) without a male guardian.

Seierstad, the bestselling author of The Bookseller of Kabul, gives a heartbreaking account of the first day of school. Senior girls wearing regulation black dresses and white headscarves arrived, keen to learn. They had “expectant faces”. The same morning, the Taliban’s education ministry ordered female secondary schools to remain closed. In some provinces, Taliban fighters stormed classrooms, beating girls with rods and berating them. In 2022, women were banned from university.

It is Afghan women and girls who are paying a terrible price for our missteps. Since the Taliban took power poverty, hunger and infant mortality have soared. Bristow argues we need a “proper reckoning” of why the campaign in Afghanistan ended the way it did. A lack of resolve contributed to Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, he thinks. The only “glimmer of light” he sees comes from courageous Afghans who defended their right to live freely and in peace.

Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber (£10.99)

Kabul: Final Call: The Inside Story of the Withdrawal from Afghanistan August 2021 by Laurie Bristow is published by Whittles Publishing (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Victoria’s oldest independent bookshop has apologised after its owner called for more picture books with “just white kids on the cover” and claimed that the chain would stop stocking “woke agenda” content that divided people.

Susanne Horman, the owner of Robinsons Bookshop chain, posted a series of tweets in December where she called for an “substantial shift” in Australian publishing, arguing the focus should be in line with public opinion, requests for books and “for what is good”.

“What’s missing from our bookshelves in store?” Horman wrote in one tweet, before the account was deleted. “Positive male lead characters of any age, any traditional nuclear white family stories, kids picture books with just white kids on the cover, and no wheelchair, rainbow or indigenous art, non indig [sic] aus history.”

Another post read: “Books we don’t need: hate against white Australians, socialist agenda, equity over equality, diversity and inclusion (READ AS anti-white exclusion), left wing govt propaganda. Basically the woke agenda that divides people. Not stocking any of these in 2024.”

Horman said she would not stock books that “intend to cause harm and make Australians hate each other”.

The posts, which were shared on an Instagram account, sparked backlash on social media, with some users saying they would boycott the stores.

In a Facebook post on Sunday night, Robinsons Bookshop said the comments had been “taken out of context” and “misrepresented the views” of the company.

“We sincerely apologise to anyone who has been offended by online comments that are being edited by individuals and posted on social media about Robinsons,” the post read.

“We clearly state, so there is no misunderstanding, that we fully support and encourage stories from diverse voices, minorities and we are most definitely stocking these important topics and the authors that write them.”

The bookstore said it would continue to advocate for “positive hope-filled stories that bring out the best in all our community and make all people feel supported and fulfilled.

“We ask everyone to treat all of our staff with kindness and respect.”

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In a second Facebook post on Monday, the Robinsons Bookshop said it wanted to clarify the intent of the comments made by Horman.

It said the buying team at the company had noticed most books being released had “little variation of themes”.

“While some genres are overflowing on the shelves, others are noticeably bare,” the post said.

“Positive stories with men and boys as the hero are almost missing from the mix. Neither Susanne Horman, nor Robinsons Bookshop are making a value judgement on this observation. Susanne apologises if people have taken this comment as a negative reflection on an excellent range of diverse books.”

Robinsons Bookshop has seven stores across Melbourne, including in Frankston, Werribee and Greensborough.

Guardian Australia has contacted Horman for comment.

Deprived children are being robbed of a lifetime of reading for pleasure, by governments that are “simply blind” to the benefits of loving literature from an early age, according to the author Michael Morpurgo.

Morpurgo and a coalition of leading authors, including Julia Donaldson, Malorie Blackman and Cressida Cowell, are backing a call by BookTrust to ensure that every child from a low-income family has access to books and reading activities by investing in a programme across schools and nurseries.

“We have to acknowledge the right of every single child in this country to have access, physically, intellectually and emotionally, to reading. And that will not happen unless the books are there, and it will not happen unless books are shared early,” said Morpurgo, the author of well-loved classics such as War Horse and The Butterfly Lion.

Morpurgo said the UK had a “division of opportunity” between children with access to books, whose lives and education were “massively enriched” as a result, and those from deprived backgrounds that did not.

“Any government that doesn’t recognise this is simply blind,” said Morpurgo.

“We do have a hugely divided society, particularly at the moment when we have so many millions living in poverty, and these are the very children who are exposed to this lack of commitment to passing on what is arguably the greatest asset we have in this country, our literature from this remarkable language we have got.

“These are also the most likely children to be suffering from mental health issues, from lack of self-worth and from family problems at home. These are the very children who most need to find the pathway to fulfilment and achievement that books can bring.”

Research by BookTrust has found that only half of children aged between one and two from low-income families are read to every day.

Morpurgo is one of the 12 past and present children’s laureates who have signed the BookTrust’s letter to Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, as well as to the first ministers and opposition leaders in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Library closures by local authorities were particularly likely to affect disadvantaged families, according to Morpurgo, by closing off a vital source of access to books.

“We should never, ever, in this country close down a library again,” he said.

“I live in the middle of Devon, where the nearest library is a long way away, we’re talking about a 35-minute drive if you have a car and a lot of people haven’t. There’s no local bookshop, even if you had the money. The library is the last lifeline to reading.”

Morpurgo also called for government to allow schools more time to encourage reading for pleasure, rather than as tools for passing exams.

“That’s what we have got to get away from, the idea that English literature and books are just something to study. They’re not. They are there to enjoy and become part of your life, not just to be studied and quizzed on,” Morpurgo said.

“That is where governments can help. In schools, teachers complain all the time that there is no room in the curriculum, there’s no room for just sitting and telling and reading a story.

“When I go to schools, time and time again teachers say it’s so important but there isn’t time. Well, the government can provide that time and recognise that the enjoyment of a story when you are five, six or seven is so important, not just for your education but throughout your life.”

Morpurgo said the call by BookTrust and Scottish Book Trust applied across the UK’s national boundaries.

“We are part of the same society, and it’s important for our democracy in all our countries that we understand truth. There is great truth in literature – it sound ridiculous but fiction is rather a wonderful way of accessing truth.

“What do you learn from the plays of Shakespeare or the books of Dickens? You learn about how deceitful and wretched and vile people can be, you learn about the spread of humanity – it’s so important that children are exposed to this, and quite young too, so it means something to them and not just something they study at school.”

A prize-winning Bosnian and Serbian novelist has cut ties with her German publisher in protest against what she describes as its silence on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as a call for an all-out boycott of German cultural institutions over the government’s pro-Israel stance divides opinion.

Lana Bastašić, 37, who won the 2020 EU prize for literature for her debut novel, Catch the Rabbit, posted on Instagram on Monday that it had been her “moral and ethical duty to terminate my contracts” with the publishing house S Fischer, citing its failure “to be vocal about the ongoing genocide happening in Gaza”, as well as the “censorship” of pro-Palestinian voices in Germany.

Founded in 1886 by the Jewish publicist Samuel von Fischer, Frankfurt-S. Fischer Verlag was driven into exile by the Nazi regime in 1936. On its website, the publishing house states its intention to “stand up to new forms of antisemitic and racist thinking and action […] especially after Hamas’ massacre on 7 October 2023”.

A spokesperson for S Fischer confirmed that Bastašić had terminated her contract in December, adding: “We respect her decision and are in constructive talks with her agency.”

In an email to the Guardian, Bastašić said the contract she had terminated was for her next novel, which is still in the process of being written. “I walked away from enough money to last me a year,” she said.

Germany’s government has been one of Israel’s most vocal allies since the recent escalation of the conflict in the Middle East. On Friday, it said the accusation of genocide against Israel at international court of justice was completely unfounded and amounted to a “political instrumentalisation” of the UN genocide convention.

This stance has proved particularly divisive in Germany’s cultural sector. Bastašić’s announcement comes a week after the launch of a petition calling for a boycott of German cultural institutions over what it calls their “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine”.

The anonymous organisers of the petition, entitled “Strike Germany”, claimed on Monday they had amassed more than 1,000 signatories, including those of the Nobel prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux and several recent winners of the British Turner art prize, including Tai Shani and Jesse Darling.

Whether all signatories have been verified, however, is doubtful. On Monday morning, the website’s list of signatories also included that of Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian Nobel literature prize winner who died in 1952.

It is also unclear if the petition’s supporters will boycott German cultural institutions, or if the petition merely calls for such a move in the future. Suhrkamp, Ernaux’s German publisher, confirmed in an email to the Guardian that the author had signed the petition but that the publications and dramatic stagings of her texts in Germany would not be affected by the call for a strike.

Theatres in Hamburg, Osnabrück and Weimar, which are due to show plays based on Ernaux’s writing in the coming weeks, all said they expected these performances to go ahead as scheduled.

One cause behind recent criticism of censorship in Germany is a new “anti-discrimination clause” that must be signed by applicants in order to get cultural funding from Berlin. Announced by the German capital’s culture senator, Joe Chialo, at the start of the year, the clause is ostensibly meant to ensure that “no racist, antisemitic, queerphobic or otherwise discriminatory expressions are supported with public funds”.

Many figures in the art world have criticised the clause for relying on the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, saying it would have a stifling effect on legitimate criticism of Israel’s actions.

Critics of Berlin’s anti-discrimination clause include not only the organisers of the Strike Germany petition but also the president of the state-funded Goethe Institute cultural association. In an op-ed for Der Spiegel published on Sunday, Carola Lentz warned that such a move risked instrumentalising art for political ends.

National book awards: finalists use ceremony to call for Israel-Hamas ceasefire after sponsors pull out

Nov 16 2023

A majority of this year’s finalists at the national book awards made a collective statement calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war at the ceremony in New York on Thursday, amid a storm behind the scenes as sponsors pulled out in anticipation.

Twenty of the 25 finalists up for the five categories – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s literature and translated literature – got on stage as author Aaliyah Bilal, nominated in the fiction category for her novel Temple Folk, read out the prepared statement.

“On behalf of the finalists, we oppose the ongoing bombardment of Gaza and call for an humanitarian ceasefire to address the urgent humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians, particularly children,” Bilal read.

“We oppose antisemitism and anti-Palestinian sentiment and Islamophobia equally, accepting the human dignity of all parties, knowing that further bloodshed does nothing to secure lasting peace in the region.”

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