Sally Rooney’s Novels Pulled From Sale in Britain Over Support for Banned Group

Readers in Britain can no longer buy new copies of Sally Rooney’s novels. The Irish author and her publisher, Faber, said this week that her books, including Normal People, Conversations with Friends and Intermezzo, will no longer be supplied in the United Kingdom in any format, according to ABC News in Australia and Euronews.

The reason is legal rather than commercial. The British government banned the activist group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization in July 2025, putting it in the same legal category as Hamas and Hezbollah and making it a crime in the UK to belong to, support or finance it. Rooney has publicly backed the group and has said she would give earnings to it. Faber said current British law means it cannot pass on her UK earnings, calling that an unconscionable situation for a publisher, and said it had decided in full agreement with Rooney that it could no longer sell her work there. The company will continue to publish her elsewhere.

Rooney said that, under the ban, fulfilling her contracts to publish in Britain could now amount to a serious criminal offense. She said she had tried to be honest about her beliefs and was prepared to accept the consequences, Euronews reported. She did not attend a ceremony at which she won the Sky Arts literature award for Intermezzo, saying she could no longer safely enter the UK without potentially facing arrest, ABC News in Australia reported. The group is not banned in Ireland, where she lives.

The decision follows months of warnings. In August 2025, shortly after the ban took effect, Rooney wrote that she would keep supporting the group, and the British government cautioned that her support could break the law, Euronews reported. She later warned that no new books of hers would be published in Britain while the ban remained.

Palestine Action says its goal is to end what it calls global participation in Israel’s regime, and its proscription followed a campaign of break-ins and attacks on weapons factories, particularly those of the Israeli arms maker Elbit. More than 3,700 people are believed to have been arrested in connection with the ban, according to Euronews and ABC News in Australia, which cited the BBC. Huda Ammori, a co-founder, called Rooney’s situation a new low in what she described as an assault on free speech. Britain’s highest court is expected to hear an appeal against the ban next month, ABC News in Australia reported.

Defenders of the ban argue that a group whose campaign included attacks on weapons factories cannot shield itself by calling that protest, and that the law on financing a proscribed organization must apply to a celebrated novelist as it would to anyone else.

Critics, including rights groups, say the case shows how far a terrorism law can reach into ordinary cultural life when it is aimed at a direct-action protest group. Whatever the courts decide, one of the most widely read novelists of her generation is, for now, effectively out of print in the country where much of her audience lives.