Sally Rooney, the bestselling Irish author of books including Normal People and Intermezzo, has said her novels will no longer be supplied to U.K. booksellers because of her support for the group Palestine Action. Palestine Action is a proscribed terrorist organization in the U.K. It was proscribed by the U.K. government in July of 2025, which said that the group had a long history of criminal damage.
The group has targeted companies linked to Israel’s war in Gaza with direct action intended to disrupt. Rooney has been vocal in her support for the group, and said that she intended to use, and continue to use, royalties from her books to support the group. The month after Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organization, Rooney wrote a piece “expressing my intention to go on supporting Palestine Action, which is not a proscribed or otherwise prohibited group here in the Republic of Ireland,” she said in a statement shared with Newsweek over email.
Her publisher, Faber, said in a statement that they remain the “proud publisher of her remarkable body of work.” Rooney has sold millions of books globally. She has published four books: 2017’s Conversations with Friends, 2019’s Normal People, 2021’s Beautiful World Where Are You and 2024’s Intermezzo, as well as the 2019 short story, Mr Salary. Her first two books were adapted into television miniseries.
Normal People was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The publication of Intermezzo in 2024 was described by Faber & Faber as its “biggest trade campaign ever,” and saw them partner with 40 bookshops. Ebook editions of her work have already been removed from sale in the U.K.
Many bookshops have existing stock of physical copies. The bookshop Waterstones confirmed to the BBC that Faber had advised them that there is no restriction on keeping current copies on shelves. It is currently unclear if this will have any bearing on the publication of Rooney’s books in the U.S.
Her 2018 book, Normal People, had previously been banned in some U.S. schools due to moral objections over sexual content, according to the PEN American Index of School Book Bans. Newsweek has contacted Rooney’s U.S. publisher via email for comment. Palestine Action was founded in 2020 and has engaged in a series of direct-action protests since then, primarily against arms manufacturers who sell weapons to Israel and operate in the U.K.
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