15 October 2026 - 7:00am
Starting this week, London’s native population of yearning, bookish sadgirls will undergo a mass migration. They will abandon the cosy coffee tables at the Gower Street Waterstones, the spiritual homeland of earnest readers with tote bags, skinny scarves and badges that say “hot girls read”. Instead, they’ll flock west to the Marylebone Oxfam, where they might hoover up second-hand copies of Sally Rooney’s novels. What has prompted their autumn flight? The news that Rooney’s books will no longer be supplied by Faber in the UK.
The publisher has announced that it cannot pass on Rooney’s royalties to the banned activist group Palestine Action, which the Irish novelist has pledged to support. Faber explained that “to sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation.” Instead it decided, “in full agreement with Sally”, not to supply her work “in any format”. For the uninitiated, Rooney is the famed author of Normal People — the mopey tome that made a virtue of spectacularly bald prose and catapulted Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal to fame with a blockbuster BBC adaptation. She has also written, among others, Conversations with Friends and Intermezzo; the latter came out in 2024 to generally favourable reviews (with the exception of my own).
Rooney has been an outspoken supporter of the pro-Palestine movement since the horrors of October 7 — horrors to which Palestine Action’s co-founder Richard Barnard referred as the “al-Aqsa flood”, borrowing Hamas’s term. In July last year, Parliament voted to proscribe the group under terrorism legislation after its members broke into RAF Brize Norton and spray-painted two refuelling planes red to symbolise Gazan blood. This was the final straw following a string of stunts; most notoriously, in August 2024, activists breached the Gloucestershire site of Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems and, during a scuffle with police, 23-year-old Samuel Corner hit a female officer in the spine with a sledgehammer (he was convicted of GBH). The ban was overturned in February and reinstated on appeal in June this year; the Supreme Court will hear another appeal in three weeks’ time.
In August last year Rooney pledged proceeds from two BBC adaptations of her novels to the group. A month later, she missed a London awards event out of fear of being arrested under the UK Terrorism Act 2000.
It would be too cynical to suggest that Rooney and the other celebrities who have risked professional doom for Palestine are doing it for self-promotion. I have no doubt that she and the rapper Macklemore, the singer Dua Lipa, the actor Javier Bardem and actress Hannah Einbinder, among others, are sincere. But however well-meaning their patronage, it does little to temper suspicion at what I am choosing to call the “virtue laundering” of middling art.
Whichever way you slice an artist’s stance on Israel-Palestine — and a healthy democracy should certainly tolerate dissent — we cannot escape the reality that an artist larping as a freedom fighter, often in support of dubious factions, confers a righteousness premium on his or her output. As a queasy consequence of our omnicause-orbiting pop culture, moral credibility converts more easily than ever to artistic prestige. So it is that celebrities regularly appear on graphs from least to most woke, or on checklists organised around public advocacy on specific issues. It is a strange culture that corrals chart music into boycotts.
Of course, the real problem is that being politically controversial is not evidence of genius. In fact, it has no bearing on artistic merit; if anything, it only bakes in performative activism among celebrities whose primary calling is to compose and/or entertain. London’s literary sadgirls have long equated Rooney’s aggressively sparse writing with profundity, a sort of second coming of Anne Carson. Her support for Palestine Action is yet another magnet for misdirected praise, whether she intends it or not.
Today, censorship can be more canny than a seasoned publicist. I’ll let the reader decide if this makes reading about dreary Dublin mid-offs any more bearable.
