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Tag Archives: Rooney
Referee Chris Rooney trolled for speech before Rangers-Lightning game
The Rangers season got off to a strange start on Tuesday.
Ahead of the Rangers-Lighting opener at MSG — the first stateside game of the season — veteran referee Chris Rooney delivered an awkward welcome speech before dropping the puck that had NHL Twitter in hysterics.
“To our great players and great fans, welcome to opening night of the 2022-23 regular season,” Rooney said while standing at center ice. “What’s better than this? Good luck to all players. Let’s have a great season.”
Players from both teams awkwardly stood on the ice until Rooney dropped the puck. The unusual impromptu moment made for a memorable start to the 2022-23 season.
“Everything about this is funny,” one person tweeted. “From the dull delivery, the ‘what’s better than this,’ to Chris Rooney being called one of the best in the league. The NHL is back.”
“I cannot believe they made Chris Rooney do that,” another person tweeted. “I would have died if I was about to take the faceoff lol.”
One person said that they had “second hand embarrassment” for Rooney during his speech.
Others enjoyed Rooney’s pre-puck drop speech, with one person tweeting, “I need to hear Chris Rooney’s thoughts before every faceoff.”
It’s unclear how exactly Rooney’s speech came to fruition.
The Rangers defeated the Lightning, 3-1, in a highly anticipated rematch of the 2021-22 Eastern Conference finals. The Rangers visit the Minnesota Wild on Thursday.
In Wayne Rooney debut, D.C. United rallies for stunning win
What transpired over the subsequent two hours in misty conditions rekindled some of the magic that Rooney injected as a striker in 2018 and 2019. Staring at another defeat, United not only tied the score in the waning moments but won it in the last seconds of stoppage time, 2-1.
Chris Durkin scored the equalizer on a one-timer from the heart of the penalty area, then Taxi Fountas volleyed in from 12 yards, triggering bedlam among the 15,805 at Buzzard Point.
“The season has to start now,” said Rooney, who was hired three weeks ago but, until he received his work visa late last week, was limited to a consulting role. “Character is a big word I have used over the last couple of weeks with the team. We need to be a team that shows a lot of character and fight and togetherness.”
After falling behind early, United (6-12-3) showed those qualities in a stirring second half and won for just the second time since early May.
“That’s exactly what we needed,” defender Brendan Hines-Ike said. “We need to know we can win games. You lose so many games, you forget what it’s like to win.”
United’s persistence finally paid off in staggering fashion. As the first minute of stoppage time elapsed, substitute Ola Kamara snapped a left-sided cross to Durkin for a rising effort and his first goal of the year.
“When we got the goal,” Durkin said, “we were still pushing and still wanting to score another goal.”
Martín Rodríguez, a substitute, served a long ball to Kimarni Smith, a sub. Smith volleyed the ball from the left side into the center of the box, where Fountas one-timed it into the right corner for his team-best 11th goal. Almost four weeks ago, Fountas recorded a hat trick in Orlando.
“I am proud the guys didn’t settle for a tie,” captain Steven Birnbaum said.
As a player, Rooney bedeviled Orlando (8-9-6) with goals, including a 60-yarder, and a remarkable tackle-assist sequence that cemented his place in United history. As a coach, with United undergoing roster changes and the team at the bottom of the standings, his influence Sunday had limits.
What he has instilled, the players said, is belief and the freedom to express themselves.
“A big thing which I’ve seen in my research on the team is when a player makes a mistake, they suffer and really found it difficult to come back from that,” Rooney said. “I understand players will make mistakes — no problem. I want them to try things. I want them to risk the ball in the right areas. And if they make a mistake and give the ball away, try it again. That’s part of the game. Giving the players that freedom of mind and to be able to do that is starting to make a difference.”
It did not start well. Orlando went ahead in the ninth minute, the fifth time in seven matches United had conceded a goal in the opening 15 minutes.
After a D.C. giveaway in midfield, Alexandre Pato slipped the ball ahead to Júnior Urso in stride for a one-timer from the top corner of the box. With goalkeeper Rafael Romo well off his line, Urso delicately chipped it into the far side.
In the 28th minute, Romo was caught surging forward on a long ball and, amid a mad scramble by his defenders to cover an open net, Pato missed high. Ten minutes later, Orlando’s Benji Michel missed an open net.
The match began to swing with the entrance at halftime of Rodríguez, a Chilean winger who debuted the previous weekend. Fountas had a glorious chance to equalize in the 61st minute, but Pedro Gallese made a sensational leg save.
United buzzed with energy and opportunity, culminating with the two late strikes.
“Now it’s about consistency,” Hines-Ike said. “Can D.C. United put together a string of results? Or does it go back to the same old same old the last few months? We can’t accept that anymore.”
Here’s what else to know about United’s victory:
Romo made his eighth consecutive start and Jon Kempin was the usual backup, but with the acquisition of David Ochoa from Real Salt Lake last week, the pecking order is about to change.
Ochoa, 21, is scheduled to travel to Charlotte on Wednesday and seems almost certain to start. In that case, Romo would drop to No. 2 on the depth chart.
Bill Hamid, the longtime starter who is in the final year of his contract, continues to rehabilitate a hand injury that required surgery June 30. The initial timetable for his return was two to three months.
Estrada left off roster again
Forward Michael Estrada was a healthy scratch for the second straight game, a sign United probably is planning to end his season-long loan from Mexican club Toluca soon. The Ecuadoran national team member has four goals and four assists in 16 league matches (11 starts) but hasn’t scored since May 21.
United has an option to purchase his contract after this season for $5 million. By returning him to Toluca, the club would clear senior roster space, including an international slot. …
Forward Nigel Robertha, who has one goal and three assists in 14 matches (five starts), also was scratched. He is under contract through 2023. …
Midfielders Russell Canouse (leg injury) and Ted Ku-DiPietro (non-covid illness recovery) were unavailable. Midfielder Victor Palsson, acquired from German club Schalke last week, is awaiting a work visa. …
Rooney’s debut wasn’t the only one Sunday. Ravel Morrison, a well-traveled attacking midfielder who played for Rooney at Derby County, logged 90 minutes.
Starting at the six-minute mark, a minute of applause was conducted in memory of Len Oliver, a National Soccer Hall of Famer and longtime figure in D.C.-area soccer who died July 24. He was 88. Family members in attendance wore jerseys with No. 6, Oliver’s number as a player.
Wayne Rooney is walking into a daunting task at D.C. United
It was a familiar sight to D.C. United fans: that of Wayne Rooney emerging from the international arrivals gate at Dulles International Airport, ready to start an American sojourn. It was only four years ago that Rooney first touched down in Washington, D.C. to join the city’s Major League Soccer club as their biggest-ever signing.
Rooney won the club’s fans over quickly with his play on the field, but in a flash he was gone, returning to England after a season and a half to join Derby County.
In that summer of 2018, hundreds of D.C. United fans were joined by a throng of journalists who tailed Rooney through the airport. But on Sunday evening there was no fanfare — only a handful of club employees and a few civilians who recognised the 36-year-old as he walked through the terminal and car park to an SUV that whisked him away. There were no flash bulbs, no autograph-seekers.
Truth be told, before Sunday evening, very few people in D.C. knew Rooney had already agreed to manage the MLS club.
Yet that fact became readily apparent as soon as Rooney emerged into view, accompanied by four massive travel cases — not the sort of luggage you bring if you’re merely visiting for a job interview. Rooney seems in it for the long haul this time.
Given D.C. United’s current state of affairs, he’ll need to be.
The club are in disarray.
Along with Chicago Fire, United have the fewest points in MLS and are fresh off a 7-0 rout at the hands of the Philadelphia Union at the weekend that ranks as the worst loss in club history, and joint-worst in league history. In the past weeks, they have lost several key players to injury — namely defender Brad Smith, formerly of Liverpool and Bournemouth, who will miss the remaining three months of the season with a torn ACL, and first-choice goalkeeper Bill Hamid, who underwent hand surgery and won’t return until late in the season (if at all).
Chad Ashton, the interim coach who Rooney will replace, has been shepherding the club through this rough stretch.
Ashton, an assistant at United for the past 15 years, replaced Hernan Losada in April after the Argentinian was dismissed amid allegations that he had lost the dressing room and was pushing players too far in regards to fitness and lifestyle demands. With the exception of a handful of bright spots — mid-season addition Taxiarchis Fountas has impressed — United have been tough to watch, and even tougher to support.
Rooney’s history with the club is brief but memorable.
He arrived four years ago just as United opened their new stadium, Audi Field.
Historically, D.C. United are among the most successful clubs in the league, winners of four MLS Cups, three U.S. Open Cups and a host of other trophies. But by 2018, they were in dire straits and had become irrelevant both in MLS and the local sports scene. They were a mid-table team, at best, who almost never progressed past the opening round of the playoffs and often missed them altogether.
Rooney changed that immediately.
He looked reborn with D.C. United after his 13 years with Manchester United ended in 2017, followed by a season back at boyhood club Everton, completely remaking the club on the pitch.
The former England captain was a model team-mate, choosing to remain in the trenches with players who made a fraction of his wages and had none of his fame. Despite his advanced age, he was a highlight specialist, deadly on set pieces, and before long, he began speaking of his desire to enter the coaching ranks. For a time, he seemed a shoo-in to be D.C. United’s next manager.
WAYNE ROONEY FROM PAST MIDFIELD!!!! pic.twitter.com/dJ5BriAOx3
— Major League Soccer (@MLS) June 27, 2019
But Rooney departed midway through a three-year deal, choosing to return to the UK and join Derby, then of the second-tier Championship. He signed initially as a player with an eye on a future coaching career, and within a year was the club’s manager.
In his absence, D.C. slipped back into irrelevance, both on and off the pitch. They have not made the playoffs since his departure and have struggled to recapture local fans — a matter not helped by the pandemic. Rooney’s return, some observers have noted, may be as much about raising the profile of the club as it is about helping improve their results.
Because of this, some supporters remain sceptical. Fans in the D.C. area are discerning; the region is multicultural and has long been a hotbed of soccer support in the United States. Rooney’s brief history as a manager at Derby is nearly impossible to analyse in any black-and-white sense, as fielding a competitive side amid the club’s financial issues seemed difficult at best — something D.C. United fans are largely aware of.
Still, many of United’s most ardent supporters are undeniably excited by his arrival, seduced not only by his name but by the fact that he was, by and large, the last truly captivating player they had.
Fans have raised other questions as well, though — Rooney’s early departure from D.C. was framed, at the time, as a personal decision made in part by his wife Coleen seeming unhappy living in the States, something later confirmed by texts entered into evidence during her defamation case against Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy’s wife, Rebekah.
Some wonder whether a move back to the US is viable in the long-term, given those circumstances.
Others in MLS are more optimistic about Rooney’s potential as a manager in the North American league.
Rooney made almost 50 appearances for D.C. United from summer 2018 (Photo: Tony Quinn/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Inter Miami manager Phil Neville, a Rooney team-mate at the start of his Manchester United career who later coached him as a member of David Moyes’ Old Trafford staff near the end of it, offered his thoughts on the appointment during a press conference on Monday.
“I suppose Wayne’s got a slight advantage over me coming into the league, because he played in MLS,” Neville told reporters. “He’s got experience in MLS, he’s been on the road trips, he’s played with some of these players, he’s played in these stadiums, been in the environments and the climates. He knows what it’s all about and that gives him a great advantage.
“He’s not one of those managers you read about in MLS that come from foreign shores and it takes them 12 months to 18 months to get used to it and the salary caps. He’s been involved in the salary caps and knows everything about the league.”
Rooney has kept in touch with a handful of D.C. United’s players and retained an excellent relationship, by and large, with the club’s executives — something made readily apparent by his hiring and his rumoured salary of $1,000,000 a year, which would be nearly triple that of his predecessor.
The club have reassured Rooney he’ll have fair influence over personnel selections as the league’s summer transfer window remains open for another few weeks. United have two open “designated player” slots, a distinction reserved for an MLS club’s highest-paid players, and it seems likely they will fill at least one of those in this window.
D.C. United have been linked recently with unattached Uruguayan legend Luis Suarez, though the 35-year-old former Liverpool, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid attacker has openly stated that any MLS club he plays for would need to be a playoff contender ahead of this year’s World Cup.
United need help all over the pitch. Aside from 26-year-old Greek attacker Fountas, a mid-season acquisition from Austria’s Rapid Vienna who is off to a blistering start with nine goals in his first 10 matches, the club have had few bright spots this season.
Their back line, which has kept them in matches for years, has suddenly become unreliable. They lack fluidity and precision through midfield and they have struggled to score goals. Hamid’s absence doesn’t help, either.
Yet things change fast in MLS.
Generally speaking, if you hit on your designated player signings, for example, you’ll contend. But the league is full of teams who spend meagerly and still make the playoffs, though that pack thins year by year as MLS continues to grow and money continues to flow in.
What kind of outlay United, who are joint-bottom of the Eastern Conference table but don’t have to worry about going down as there’s no relegation in MLS, will make on talent under Rooney remains to be seen.
They are typically not among the league’s highest-spending sides — far from it. And that has been true for some time, a fact Rooney has always been keenly aware of. During his time as a player in D.C., he pushed the club to spend more on players, facilities and the like. MLS is a league increasingly filled with billionaire owners who are able to test the limits of the league’s nuanced salary cap structure. D.C. United’s owners, who are also co-owners of Swansea City, do not have the same resources as some others.
By accepting this job, Rooney must be confident he can thrive in the circumstances he’s being offered. Confident or not, one thing remains clear: he has a lot of work to do.
(Photo: D.C. United suffered a record 7-0 loss at the weekend. Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images)
Wayne Rooney agrees to coach D.C. United
D.C. is 5-10-2 for 17 points, tied with Chicago for the fewest in the 28-team league.
Team officials said they did not want to comment. Paul Stretford, Rooney’s longtime agent, did not travel with Rooney but was expected to arrive in Washington this week.
Those close to the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter freely, said the sides are soon expected to finalize a multiyear deal worth at least $1 million annually, which would be the highest coaching salary in club history.
Once the deal is completed and he receives a work permit, Rooney will take the reins from interim coach Chad Ashton, who replaced Hernán Losada six games into the season. Ashton will continue to guide the team until then. Ashton is then expected to return to the assistant role he has filled for most of the past 15 years. Until he receives the permit, which typically takes two to three weeks, Rooney will serve as a team consultant, one person said.
Ashton was informed of the coaching decision over the weekend, and via a virtual team meeting Sunday, club officials told the players of Rooney’s impending arrival.
Rooney — a Manchester United legend and the greatest scorer in English national team history — retired in January 2021, shortly after being named coach of Derby County, a second-flight English squad. He stepped down last month after Derby, riddled by financial problems, was relegated to the third division.
Rooney plans to hire an assistant from English circles, one person said, and attempt to persuade European-based players he knows to sign with United during the transfer window — which is open until Aug. 4 — or before the 2023 season.
Among the targets, that person said, is Uruguayan forward Luis Suárez, the 35-year-old former Liverpool, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid star who is a free agent. United has two open slots for designated players, the MLS classification for high-end acquisitions.
Since leaving United after the 2019 season, Rooney has remained friendly with some D.C. players and team executives, who have consulted with him multiple times on possible player signings.
United has not qualified for the playoffs since Rooney’s second year in MLS. He had planned to play in Washington at least one more season, but because his family wasn’t comfortable living abroad, he and the club agreed to part ways. It’s unclear when his wife and four children will join him here.
What also remained unclear Sunday was whether United complied with MLS’s diversity hiring policy, which requires at least two non-White candidates among the finalists for technical staff positions. No other names have surfaced publicly.
The league does grant waivers under “extenuating circumstances.” United did not have to follow that policy when Ashton replaced Losada because it was filling the job on an interim basis.
An MLS spokesman said the league would provide an update Monday.
Wayne Rooney agrees to terms to become D.C. United manager: Sources
Wayne Rooney and D.C. United have agreed on terms to become the club’s newest manager, sources confirmed to The Athletic.
Rooney, who only recently stepped aside from English Championship side Derby County after a tumultuous 18-month run as the club’s manager, has been in talks with United about a potential move for “weeks,” multiple sources said on Sunday evening. As a player, Rooney captained D.C. United during a memorable stay in 2018-19 before cutting his contract short to move to Derby.
In D.C., Rooney inherits a team in disarray. Under the leadership of current interim head coach Chad Ashton, D.C. sit in 13th place in MLS’ Eastern Conference and are fresh off a 7-0 drubbing at the hands of the Philadelphia Union that ranks as the club’s most lopsided loss in history. Ashton, who took the reins after United parted ways with former head coach Hernán Losada earlier this year, was intended to guide the club through the end of this season at a minimum, but that may change.
During his time as a player, Rooney seemed like he might prove instrumental in guiding United — once among the most successful franchises in MLS history — back to relevance and success. The club has floundered since his departure, failing to make the playoffs in 2020 and 2021. Now, Rooney seems like he may be poised for a second chance.
(Photo: Pablo Maurer / The Athletic)
Conversations with Friends review: De-Irished Sally Rooney adaptation is slow and solipsistic
It is a truth universally acknowledged – at least among people of a certain age and socio-economic demographic – that Conversations with Friends is Sally Rooney’s best novel, a debut superior to its acclaimed follow-up, Normal People. So it’s no surprise to find the BBC returning to the territory that made 2020’s Normal People one of the first true hits of lockdown, a Tiger King for the generation gleefully squandering their mortgage money on turmeric lattes. Conversations with Friends revisits the formula so faithfully that even the absence of any narrative continuity cannot prevent this feeling like a sequel.
Conversations with Friends follows the tangled lives of Frances (newcomer Alison Oliver) and Bobbi (American Honey’s Sasha Lane), who are best friends, ex-lovers, and, to their eternal shame, performance poets. “You’re quite intense together,” Nick (The Favourite’s Joe Alwyn) observes, after the duo are roped into dinner by his wife Melissa (Girls’ Jemima Kirke). Nick and Melissa, an actor and writer respectively, become sources of fixation for the girls. Frances develops an all-consuming, and very much requited, crush on Nick, while Bobbi drifts along in flirtatious repartee with Melissa. “Can you actually imagine them on their own?” questions Bobbi, as she and Frances come steamrolling into this marriage.
As viewers, we don’t have to (though we may want to). Conversations with Friends is a home invasion story: Frances and Bobbi blow in like a harsh wind off the Irish sea. Frances, a self-avowed communist, gets all moony over the couple’s mid-century furniture. “Your house is very cool,” she says. “You two are such grown-ups,” adds Bobbi. That glossy veneer of Nick and Melissa’s lives – the essential capitalistic impulse to consume and own – is the show’s central, but agnostic, critique. Asked why she writes poetry, Frances responds that she likes “the impermanence of it”. “I feel a bit sick when I think about it lasting forever,” she adds. Eventually she finds her mind, her body, her experiences, all commodified by her affair with Nick. Cue much unhappy pondering of humanity’s terminal state of misery.
The story is Frances’s, and Alison Oliver – all anxious lip-biting and nervy dry swallows – more than carries the piece. She is a lone Celtic presence in a production that feels conspicuously de-Irished: Bobbi is now American and Melissa English. Those performances feel very much within their actors’ established ranges (oh wow, it’s Jemima Kirke playing a woman who masks her vulnerability with vociferous confidence!) but there’s a wealth of charisma going round. London boy Joe Alwyn (who looks uncannily, it must be said, like a golden retriever) affects an Irish lilt so subtle as to be almost undetectable, but manages to capture something of Nick’s sexless sexiness (like a well-read, emotionally manipulative Ken doll).
Conversations with Friends is long. The series runs for 12 episodes. My UK edition of the novel has 321 pages, which means, various boffins assure me, that each episode represents about 27 pages’ worth of action. The problem of protraction (or compression) is endemic in the adaptation of novels, but the pacing of Conversations with Friends feels so indulgently languorous, the milieu (whether in Ireland or Croatia) so oppressively repetitive, that the effect is, at best, hypnotic, and, at worst, soporific. “It’s a proper play,” Nick says, of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “where stuff happens.” This, it seems to announce proudly, is the opposite.
Though it is undoubtedly slow, solipsistic, and self-satisfied, the show has an ambient appeal. It is television designed to be watched out of the corner of your eye while scrolling through Instagram, peering in at strangers on two screens simultaneously. And if the prospect of watching the lives of a group of rather entitled millennials unravel at a pace closer to Captain Tom than Mo Farah doesn’t excite you, there are plenty of close-ups of beautiful people kissing to keep you distracted. In the end, Conversations with Friends, like its characters, doesn’t have much to say, but takes its sweet time saying it.
Rooney Mara to Play Audrey Hepburn in Film Directed by Luca Guadagnino
A biopic of iconic actress Audrey Hepburn starring Rooney Mara is in the works at Apple, Variety has confirmed.
Oscar-nominated “Call Me by Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino will helm the project, with Mara producing and “The Giver” co-writer Michael Mitnick penning the script.
Though plot details are being kept under wraps, Hepburn is an acting legend celebrated for her performances in classics like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “My Fair Lady,” “Wait Until Dark,” “Charade” and “Sabrina.” During her four-decade career, Hepburn achieved EGOT status, winning Emmy, Oscar, Tony and Grammy awards, the last of which she received posthumously. She was also a dedicated humanitarian, working with UNICEF to help children in Africa, South America and Asia and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992.
Mara has been nominated for an Academy Award twice, for her work in 2011’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and 2015’s “Carol.” She most recently starred in Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” alongside Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Willem Dafoe. Mara’s upcoming projects include Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking,” a drama centering on eight Mennonite women, which also stars Frances McDormand, Ben Whishaw, Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley.
Guadagnino recently wrapped production on his upcoming romantic horror film “Bones and All,” starring Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet. The Italian filmmaker also co-created, co-wrote and directed the 2021 HBO miniseries “We Are Who We Are.” In addition to “The Giver,” Mitnick is known for his writing work on “The Current War,” “The Staggering Girl” and the HBO series “Vinyl.”
Puck was the first to report the news of the film.
Apple Lands Audrey Hepburn Biopic; Rooney Mara Starring & Producing – Deadline
Apple has landed another big feature project, that being an Audrey Hepburn biopic which Oscar-nominated filmmaker Luca Guadagnino will helm, with 2x Oscar nominee Rooney Mara set to play The Breakfast at Tiffany‘s legendary actress.
Deadline has learned separately that Mara is also producing the feature project, which Michael Mitnick, the EP of HBO series Vinyl is writing.
The movie reps Mara’s third producing credit after the documentary The End of Medicine and The Truth About Emmanuel.
Apple Studios is producing. Apple’s heads of worldwide video Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht and head of features Matt Dentler continue their momentum in building big screen fare for the streamer.
Puck first had the story about Apple developing an Audrey Hepburn movie with Mara starring, Guadagnino directing.
Mitnick is repped by Grandview, CAA and Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern. His feature credits include The Current War and The Giver. Mara was Oscar nominated for Best Actress in 2012 for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Best Supporting Actress in 2016 for Carol. Guadagnino was Oscar nominated for Best Picture for his directorial Call Me By Your Name in 2018. That movie won an Adapted Screenplay Oscar for James Ivory’s script and launched Timothée Chalamet, who also notched a Best Actor nom, to stardom.
Deadline’s Justin Kroll recently broke the news that Apple is in the homestretch on landing the Brad Pitt Formula One racing car feature directed by Top Gun: Maverick‘s Joseph Kosinski.
Hepburn was born in Ixelles, Brussels, and grew up in Netherlands during World War II when the Germans occupied the country. Hepburn used the name Edda van Heemstra, since an English-sounding name was considered more dangerous during the German occupation at the time. She would study ballet with Sonia Gaskell in Amsterdam in 1945. She would later cut her teeth as a chorus girl in London’s West End. Her first film role was tiny in the 1952 feature Monte Carlo Baby. The novelist Colette was at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo during production, and decided to cast Hepburn in the title role of the Broadway play Gigi, a part which earned her great praise. Her first leading role was 1953’s Roman Holiday for which she notched an Oscar, a Golden Globe Award, and a BAFTA Award for a single performance. That year, she also won a Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Play for her performance in Ondine. Other feature credits include Sabrina, Funny Face, Charade and My Fair Lady in a career that counted five Oscar noms and AMPAS’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993.
Sally Rooney Declines to Sell Translation Rights to Israeli Publisher
The Irish novelist Sally Rooney said on Tuesday that she would not allow the Israeli publishing house that handled her previous novels to publish her most recent book, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” because of her support for Palestinian people and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
In an email, Ms. Rooney said that she was proud to have her first two books, “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends,” published in Hebrew. “Likewise, it would be an honor for me to have my latest novel translated into Hebrew and available to Hebrew-language readers,” she said. “But for the moment, I have chosen not to sell these translation rights to an Israeli-based publishing house.”
She added that she knew some would disagree with her decision, “but I simply do not feel it would be right for me under the present circumstances to accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the U.N.-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
Her Israeli publisher, Modan Publishing House, said in an email that when it inquired about “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” which was published in English in September, it was told that she wasn’t interested in publishing it in Israel. It said it was not given an explanation.
In her email, Ms. Rooney cited a report published this year by Human Rights Watch that said the actions of the Israeli government meet the legal definition of apartheid, and she expressed her support for the B.D.S. movement, which aims to harness international political and economic pressure on Israel. Supporters say the goal of the B.D.S. movement is to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, while critics, including many Israelis, say its real aim is the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
Ms. Rooney is not the first prominent author to decline an offer to publish in Israel. Alice Walker said in 2012 that she would not allow a Hebrew translation of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple.” Ms. Walker, who was born in Georgia in 1944, said at the time, “I grew up under American apartheid and this,” she added of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, “was far worse.”
Deborah Harris, a literary agent whose company handles major authors looking to be translated and published in Israel, described Ms. Rooney’s decision as painful and counterproductive.
“When it’s ice cream or when it’s cement, or whatever else it is, it’s one thing, but when it comes to culture, I just have a very, very hard time seeing how this can be productive in changing anything,” Ms. Harris said. “What literature is supposed to do is reach into the hearts and minds of people.”
The people likely to read Ms. Rooney’s work in Israel, Ms. Harris added, are not those who support the policies to which she likely objects. “Her audience here are people who are in total support of a Palestinian state,” Ms. Harris said.
Ms. Rooney’s new book follows the friendship of two young women, Eileen, an editorial assistant at a literary magazine, and Alice, a novelist whose career raced into fame and success, much in the way that Ms. Rooney’s did.
In her statement, Ms. Rooney said that in making this decision not to publish again with Modan, she was “responding to the call from Palestinian civil society,” and she expressed solidarity with Palestinian people “in their struggle for freedom, justice and equality.”
She added that the Hebrew-language translation rights to the novel are still available, and that if she can find a way to sell them and adhere to the B.D.S. movement’s guidelines, “I will be very pleased and proud to do so.”