Sally Rooney’s refusal to stay silent on Gaza makes her one of today’s most subversive writers

Sally Rooney challenges the literary world, refusing neutrality on Gaza and apartheid, proving literature can be morally engaged

What novelist Sally Rooney threatens is the possibility that literature’s young audience might begin to expect moral seriousness from its stars, writes Colin Sheridan. Picture: Conor McCabe Photography.

In the carefully varnished world of contemporary literature, where a writer’s greatest sin is often being accused of earnestness, Sally Rooney has carved herself out as something far more dangerous: A moral presence.

That may sound odd given that we live in an era where everyone online is either performing outrage or being devoured by it.

But Rooney, in her quiet way, is doing something far more destabilising than simply throwing hashtags around.

She is daring to ask the obvious, inconvenient question: Why should a novelist plead neutrality in the face of genocide?

The answer, if you listen to her critics, is that she ought to sit down and get back to writing about awkwardly beautiful twentysomethings who struggle to say how they feel.

The answer, if you listen to Rooney, is that the writer’s quill cannot ignore the blood spilled in Gaza nor the subjugation of the Palestinian people

This is what makes her subversive. Not the cool girl Marxist chic she was once accused of hiding in her prose, but the persistence with which she insists on speaking into silence.

Literature, despite its reputation for being brave and bold, is at times a remarkably timid industry.

Writers may bluster about sex, drugs, and class struggle, but bring up Palestine at a panel discussion and watch the oxygen vanish from the room.

Hypocrisy, bias, and naivety

Rooney, born in Castlebar, schooled in Trinity, now living in a glare she openly despises, has done something most of her peers dare not: She has placed her moral weight against Israel’s flagrant system of apartheid.

She refused an Israeli publisher’s request to translate her novel Beautiful World, Where Are You into Hebrew through companies that are complicit with the state. She instead directed them toward Palestinian translators.

Cue the outrage. Cue the headlines. Cue the accusations of hypocrisy, bias, naivety, faux-feminism.

What if her choice was neither naïve nor hypocritical, but simply consistent? She had said she supported the 

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and then she acted on it.

You might not like the politics — I do — but you can’t accuse her of flinching.

In doing so, Rooney has drawn a line through the centre of the literary establishment. On one side, those who believe the writer’s duty ends at the desk, the bookshop reading, the festival circuit, and comfortable chairs sat in by MFA adjunct professors.

On the other, those who believe words are a form of currency and silence is the most expensive coin of all.

Rooney’s subversiveness isn’t in the content of her novels which, for all their delicately rendered relationships, rarely veer into the geopolitical. It’s in her willingness to be a public writer who doesn’t just promote her brand, but insists on acknowledging the brutality of the world she lives in.

For many in publishing, Gaza is a topic best avoided — the conversational equivalent of a third rail

Better to speak of abstract justice than of murdered children. Better to write essays about “ethical storytelling” than to take a position that might upset the donors of a literary prize. Rooney, by contrast, has done what Irish writers have always done at their best: Poked the bruise, called the bluff, and refused the comfort of silence.

She has done it in a world where the price for speaking is steep. It is one thing to post your solidarity with Ukraine and receive a wave of applause, it’s quite another to demand solidarity with Palestine and watch as doors quietly close. Prizes withheld. Invitations lost in the post. Reviews sharpened ever so slightly.

Subversive voices rarely begin as such. They become subversive only because the world around them is so allergic to honesty.

Rooney did not invent her politics. They were nurtured in the soil of the land that birthed her, a country long acquainted with occupation and injustice. They were sharpened in her reading, in her education, in the circles she moves through.

Sally Rooney refused an Israeli publisher’s request to translate her novel ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’, through companies that are complicit with the state.

That she happens to be a best-selling author simply makes her refusal to play the role of neutral celebrity all the more startling.

Critics often mistake her popularity for mere fashion — young readers falling for autofiction with leftist gloss. But it turns out those same readers, millions of them, are being introduced not just to her characters but to her conscience. When she speaks of Gaza, they listen. When she names apartheid, they repeat it.

Threat to establishment

What is art if not political? Well, here’s the thing: I started a masters degree in writing at an Irish university a month before October 7, 2023. I finished it 10 months later, when the dead numbered tens of thousands — amongst them hundreds of Palestinian poets, novelists, screenwriters, essayists, and students.

How many times were the words “Palestine”, “genocide”, or “Gaza” mentioned in those tiny classrooms filled with brilliant people desperate to find an agent and sell a novel? I can assure you it was negligible.

This, then, is the true danger Rooney poses to the literary establishment. Not that she is “cancelling” Israel, nor that she is “politicising literature”.

The establishment has always been political, it simply prefers its politics to be aligned with power

What Rooney threatens is the possibility that literature’s young audience might begin to expect moral seriousness from its stars.

In Ireland, we should be used to this. From Synge to Behan, O’Casey to Edna O’Brien, our writers have never simply written to amuse. They have railed against silence. They have screamed against the warm complicity of those who would rather not know. Rooney, in her turn, is part of that inheritance.

It is tempting to patronise her, to cast her as the precocious young woman out of her depth in the thickets of geopolitics, but listen carefully and you hear something else: Not naivety, but moral clarity.

A refusal to watch as the bodies mount in Gaza and pretend it is merely a regrettable sideshow to the serious business of writing novels while swilling the riesling.

In an industry allergic to risk, she has taken one. In a culture that rewards distraction, she has insisted on sharp focus. That is why she is being called subversive, because she has refused the invitation extended to every successful novelist: To smile politely, collect your royalties, and shut up.

By speaking up, she reminds us that literature is not just about observing the world but daring to change it, with all its ugliness, all its injustice, all its unspeakable grief.

Subversive Sally? Only in a world where telling the truth has become the most radical act of all.