An Australian publishing house has cancelled the publication of a children’s book by an award-winning Indigenous poet over comments the book’s illustrator made about the victims of the Bondi beach terror attack, whom he called “affluent beneficiaries of imperialism”.

University of Queensland said on Wednesday its publishing house would not proceed with the publication of Bila, A River Cycle, written by Jazz Money and illustrated by Matt Chun, and was considering “recycling options” for already printed copies.

The university said the decision was due to comments Chun made in an online article that “do not align with the University’s policies and values including in light of its adopted definition of antisemitism”.

In response to the decision – first reported on the independent news site Lamestream – several authors said they would terminate their contracts or refuse to work with the Brisbane publisher in future, but the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies welcomed the move, saying the university had taken a stand against “hate, vitriol and grotesque propaganda”.

Those authors include the Goorie and Koori poet Evelyn Araluen, the high-profile Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah and the award-winning First Nations author Melissa Lucashenko, who called the move an “egregious decision”.

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In January, University of Queensland Press paused publishing the book – described as “a lyrical journey through Country” which tells the story of a river that takes on human form – while it considered Chun’s comments.

Chun published a Substack post titled “We don’t mourn fascists” on 1 January about the Bondi beach attack, deploring what he called the “liberal capitulation” to the “Zionist framing” that “violence that impacts the affluent beneficiaries and perpetrators of imperialism is deserving of special attention, elaborate memorials, rolling media coverage, and international headlines”.

New South Wales police confirmed on Thursday that the Engagement and Hate Crime Unit was investigating Chun’s post.

“Whiteness, Jewishness, and the backdrop of Bondi Beach were enough to bestow every person killed with default innocence and virtue,” Chun wrote. “White, Jewish settler victimhood demands exceptional, heightened grief.

“‘We don’t mourn fascists’ has been a popular refrain from the Australian left. How quickly this slogan is discarded when the idyll of colonial Bondi is ruptured.”

Fifteen people were killed in the terror attack on 14 December, including a child aged 10.

The president of the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies, Jason Steinberg, commended UQP’s move.

“Publishing a book, no matter the topic, whose illustrator [expresses views such as Chun’s] would be unacceptable,” he said.

“It is exactly these types of sentiments expressed by a range of individuals that have enabled hate and falsehoods to fester in Australia. This creates a putrid environment for the worst terrorist attack to occur on Australian shores, specifically targeting Jewish Australians.”

Chun told Guardian Australia – which he referred to as a “liberal-imperialist” publication in his post – that he stood by “every word” of the article, “which was deeply considered and written in close consultation with Jewish comrades”.

“It will stand the test of history,” he wrote in an email. “UQP have capitulated to Zionist lobbyism and sustained pressure from pro-Israel media. We should be both disgusted and unsurprised by this.”

In January The Australian described Chun’s comments as a “tirade against Jews and Zionists”.

The bookseller Dymocks pulled other works by Chun from its shelves in January.

Money said she believed thousands of copies of Bila, A River Cycle had been printed. She said Wednesday’s decision would damage her financially and reputationally, but she was most concerned about the “really disturbing precedent it set”.

“It sucks for me that my book is getting cancelled,” she said. “But the thing to me that is most pressing about this whole story is the precedent that this sets: that even a kids’ book about a river written by an Aboriginal person on Aboriginal land can be destroyed because of a right wing media campaign.”

A UQ spokesperson denied the university was “pulping” Money’s book, saying “the books remain in storage while the University considers recycling options”.

“The University regrets the impact this matter has on … Jazz Money,” the spokesperson said. “We have enormous respect for Jazz and her work and we would welcome the opportunity to work with Jazz again in the future.”

But Money said she no longer trusted the publisher she has worked with since 2020, when she won the David Unaipon award for an emerging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writer.

The poet said the publisher’s reason for cancelling the book which they had worked on for about five years was “disingenuous” as Bila had “not got anything to do with antisemitism or Israel or Palestine”.

“The book is about a river,” she said. “It’s a beautiful book that is so gentle and lovely – and it wasn’t written by Matt. It was written by me.”

Lucashenko, the author of ​​the multi-award-winning novel Edenglassie, said she was getting legal advice about her upcoming book Blood on the Tiles, which is set to be published by UQP next year.

“It is not only silencing an Indigenous author, it’s caving in to the Murdoch press,” said the First Nations writer, who has been working with the publishing house for 30 years. “And it makes me want to put an ancestral curse on the lot of them.”

Araluen said she had written to UQP on Wednesday, saying its “shameful and abhorrent decision to pulp the work of a fellow Aboriginal storyteller without due process, communication, respect or consideration” had caused her to terminate of her relationship with the publisher immediately.

She told Guardian Australia that would involve rescinding a contract on an upcoming nonfiction book and paying back a $2,500 advance.

“For these books to be pulped is so egregiously culturally violent and wasteful and disrespectful and has absolutely demonstrated that the University of Queensland Press does not see our writers and our stories as people or as living things, that one has to be responsible to, but actually just sees us as commodities,” she said.

Abdel-Fattah said UQP had “chosen to indulge a coordinated outrage campaign designed to intimidate, delegitimise, and chill dissent”, saying that as a result Discipline would be her “first and last book with them”.

Other writers to terminate their relationship with the publisher on Wednesday included Natalia Figueroa Barroso and Sara M Saleh.

Dan Simmons, the author of more than 30 novels and short story collections spanning horror, political thrillers and science fiction such as Hyperion and The Terror, has died at age 77.

Simmons died in Longmont, Colorado on 21 February, with his wife and daughter at his side, his obituary announced.

The author was best known for Hyperion, his 1989 science fiction novel that won the prestigious Hugo award for best novel and a Locus award; Simmons later wrote three sequels.

Over his career he also won two World Fantasy awards, a dozen Locus awards, the Shirley Jackson award, and several Bram Stoker awards, while his 2007 novel The Terror, a fictionalised imagining of what happened on the doomed Franklin expedition, was adapted into an acclaimed television series in 2018.

Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948, Simmons grew up in Illinois and Indiana. He worked as an elementary school teacher for 18 years, in Missouri, New York and Colorado, where he was once finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year.

“Every day after lunch, Dan told his students a daily installment of an epic tale that started on the first day of school,” his obituary reads. “As they listened, the students would color illustrations that he’d drawn for them. When the story finally came to an end on the last day of school, many recall being reduced to tears. This story would go on to become Dan’s Hyperion Cantos.”

Simmons’s first novel, Song of Kali, was published in 1985. His other books include his 1989 vampire horror Carrion Comfort, 1991’s Summer of Night, the sci-fi epics Ilium and Olympos, and 2009’s Drood, based on the last years of Charles Dickens’s life.

His 2011 political thriller Flashback, however, was widely criticised as an anti-left rant, imagining a dystopian future where mass immigration, the climate change “hoax”, “socialist entitlement programs” and foreign policy failures under Barack Obama have led to the ruin of America, a “Second Holocaust” and the rise of an Islamic “New Global Caliphate”.

In response to the criticism, Simmons pointed out he’d written a short story version in 1991 that imagined a post-Reagan US, telling an interviewer: “I’ve been called a Nazi. I’ve been called a racist. People who have no idea of my life, what I’ve done, how I’ve worked for civil rights throughout my life, or what my politics have been, and what Democratic candidates I’ve written speeches for … They think I was just going after Obama in the book; well, it used to be Reagan, and if I had waited a few years it would be whoever else would be president.”

“Like his early reading pursuits, Dan always wrote about what he loved,” his obituary reads. “He defied literary norms by writing across genres, switching between major publishers, and defying pressure to conform to formulaic novels.

“Dan was a profoundly curious learner who delighted in connecting with other curious minds, and the many stories he dreamed up helped him connect with others throughout his entire life.”

“V13” was the code name used by those who attended the monumental court proceedings that followed the 2015 Paris terror attacks in which 130 people died and 350 were injured. V13 (vendredi 13) stands for Friday the 13th (of November). The date is engraved on our collective memory: on an unusually balmy autumn evening, carefree youth out celebrating the weekend ahead were massacred in a series of coordinated shootings claimed by Islamic State. The target, it has often been said, was a way of life, the insouciance of terrasse culture and rock concerts, just as the Charlie Hebdo massacre months earlier had been an attack on a way of thinking, on freedom of expression.

Amid the vast cultural production line that the deadly attacks spawned – memoirs, testimonies, documentaries, fiction, film, not to mention the new Museum and Memorial of Terrorism, scheduled to open in 2027 – Emmanuel Carrère’s V13 holds a special place. It chronicles the high-security trial that was unique in its scope and length. Opening on 8 September 2021, it unfolded over 10 months in a room within Paris’s Palais de Justice that was purpose-built to accommodate some 2,380 plaintiffs, 350 or so lawyers, and the media. An author, screenwriter and film-maker, Carrère sat on the uncomfortable press benches to cover it for French magazine L’Obs, and was one of the few who had the dedication and stamina to witness all sessions.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial is the full-length version of his weekly columns. The trial opened with the testimonies of those who lost a loved one, or an arm, a leg, their sleep, sanity or simply the will to live. Together with this litany of loss came a gruesome forensic examination of the shootings – the mud of splintered flesh; the deathly silence; the hellish four hours of those kept hostage in the Bataclan concert hall, with the constant fear of imminent death. Also the trembling voice of a seasoned policeman quoting the assailants’ justification: “You can blame your president, François Hollande. He’s bombing our brothers in Syria and Iraq, we’re here to pay you back.” But there are other stories of kindness, altruism and the strange intimacy of comforting a dying stranger. As victims take to the stand, we delve into their trauma or their unexpected resilience. “We live in a victim society, one which is happy to confuse the status of victim and hero,” Carrère reflects. And yet, he adds, all these young people strike him as heroes.

The killers all died – except for Salah Abdeslam, that is, who was recruited as a suicide bomber but bailed out at the last minute – so the 14 accused were mostly accomplices in the planning, facilitating and execution of the attacks. The trial only fleetingly addressed intelligence failings, acknowledged by the secret services themselves. Its ambition lay elsewhere: to acknowledge the traumatic memories of the victims and to scrutinise every detail that led to the massacre as well as the motives, personalities and routes of radicalisation of the accused. And “to form a collective narrative”, as one of the victims put it, when asked by the court about his expectations.

Among the victims were those who tried to understand the jihadists. Nadia Mondeguer, an Egyptian mother, who lost her daughter, Lamia, concluded her gripping testimony by addressing the defence lawyers: “Do your job, do it well. I mean it.” Georges Salines advocates for a restorative justice that seeks dialogue between victims and perpetrators. His daughter, Lola, died at the Bataclan, yet he found the strength to co-author a book with Azdyne Amimour, the father of one of the suicide bombers. Others, such as Antoine Leiris, a bereaved husband and author of the book Vous n’aurez pas ma haine (You Will Not Have My Hate), which then became a slogan, refused to look for vengeance, wanting only “a fair trial”.

So did the trial succeed in delivering restorative justice? Has it fostered any rapprochement or understanding between victims and perpetrators? The then prime minister, Manuel Valls, vented righteous indignation (“Understanding is already justifying”), to which Carrère responds by quoting philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.” Carrère’s pared-down, forensic style reflects this fine balancing act between ordering facts and spinning them into a narrative, between empathy and critical thinking, engaging with an adversary’s stance and making moral judgments.

Matters turn more political when Hollande is called to the stand – a legal aberration incidentally, since he is neither victim nor accused. Carrère concedes the point made by defence lawyer Olivia Ronen when she addresses Hollande on an issue of chronology: he admits France struck Syria prior to the threats issued by Islamic State. Drawing an equivalence between terrorism and supposed state terrorism in this way forms a recognisable strategy – namely a “rupture defence”. But is it fair to call into question the authority of the justice system itself?

Defence lawyer Isa Gultaslar similarly argued that it is not fanaticism that pushed so many youths into the hands of the IS, but a legitimate anger against Assad’s regime and France’s military interventions in Syria. But can the attacks be requalified as war crimes rather than an act of terrorism? Carrère’s understanding stops short when Abdeslam, after deploring the fact that many Muslims were killed in the attacks, demands that dialogue be left open, a claim as embarrassing as Adolf Eichmann’s proposal for a reconciliation committee between Jewish survivors and Nazi perpetrators.

Hannah Arendt’s legacy hovers over V13. But “the banality of evil”, the notion she coined, doesn’t really apply to jihadism. For jihadism, evil is not to be silenced, nor responsibility dispersed in a faceless bureaucracy. Rather, it is about the glorification of sadism, as IS propaganda has sadly shown.

Carrère’s account adds to the commemorative dimension of the trial, its elegant prose bringing back to life those who died, often through an unexpected detail. When it attends to the victims’ suffering, the strength and humanity Carrère brings out makes for a reading experience that is at once humbling and invigorating.

With each historical crisis, the law and the judiciary need to reinvent themselves. Literature may contribute to that process. As Carrère compares the courtroom rituals with the liturgy of a “modern church”, where “something sacred” takes place, he adds a small piece to the puzzle. As one of the victims concludes, the trial and perhaps Carrère’s account too has given them “a place and time, all the time needed to to do something with the pain. Transform it, metabolise it” into a collective narrative: a space and time to work through, to remember, in the hope that history does not repeat itself.

Henriette Korthals Altes is an associate research fellow in the faculty of medieval and modern languages at Oxford University