Sally Rooney says she is being forced to withdraw her books from sale in the UK because of her support for Palestine Action. The Irish novelist says the shift now cuts off UK royalties as Faber says it can no longer supply her work there.
Rooney tied the change to the UK’s treatment of Palestine Action after it was banned, saying she had intended to keep supporting the group and would use proceeds from her sales to do so. She added that she was prepared to accept the consequences.
July 2025 and the fallout
In July 2025, Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK, and Rooney said she wrote the following month to state that she would keep supporting it. She said the fulfilment of contracts to publish her work in the UK could now constitute a serious criminal offence, a threshold that moves this from a publishing dispute into criminal exposure for anyone handling the contracts.
Faber said current UK legislation means it cannot pass on UK earnings to Rooney. Its response is blunt: a publisher cannot sell a writer’s work and then withhold the earnings, so it has decided it can no longer supply her books in the UK in any format.
Normal People and 62.7m views
Rooney’s reach in the UK market is not small. Normal People has sold more than 1m copies, while Conversations With Friends and Beautiful World, Where Are You have each sold more than 500,000 copies. Normal People and Conversations With Friends were adapted by the, and Normal People became the broadcaster’s most-streamed series of 2020 with 62.7m views.
That scale makes the supply halt more than symbolic. If her books can no longer be supplied in the UK, stores lose access to new stock, and Rooney loses the UK earnings stream attached to those sales.
Republic of Ireland and Section 15
Rooney said Palestine Action is not a proscribed or otherwise prohibited group in the Republic of Ireland, even though it is banned in the UK. She also said last year that she had been advised any payment to her for the series would breach terrorism laws if it was known or suspected that the royalties were funding Palestine Action.
Section 15 of the Terrorism Act carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison, and more than 3,700 people are believed to have been arrested in the UK for alleged support of Palestine Action since the ban. Rooney’s cancelled trip to the UK to pick up an award now sits in the same legal frame: one writer, two jurisdictions, and a publishing business that says it cannot route money where the law now treats the flow itself as risky.
Faber is still selling Rooney’s work in other territories, but its UK line is shut. The practical answer for readers is simple: if they want her books in the UK market, that channel is now closed until the legal position changes.
