BRITISH-Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie said she was “saddened” today after being stripped of a literary award in Dortmund because of her support for the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The novelist was announced last week as the winner of the Nelly Sachs Prize, named after a Jewish poet and Nobel laureate.

But judges of the award, which is funded by Dortmund city council, said they had reversed their decision — which came after a complaint by right-wing blog Ruhrbarone.

The blog has previously been accused of calling for the genocide of Palestinians, tweeting an image in November which called for Gaza to be transformed into an open-cast mine with the hashtag #IsraelUnderFire.

But organisers of the award issued a statement saying they had cancelled this year’s prize because of Ms Shamsie’s support for the BDS campaign.

“At that time, despite prior research, the members of the jury were not aware that the author has been participating in the boycott measures against the Israeli government for its Palestinian policies since 2014,” the statement said.

Ms Shamsie spoke to Middle East Eye to warn that the decision came at a time when both frontrunners for the Israeli premiership, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, were planning to annex the West Bank.

“In this political context the jury of the Nelly Sachs prize has chosen to withdraw the award from me, on the basis of my support for a non-violent campaign to bring pressure on the Israeli government.

“It is a matter of great sadness to me that a jury should bow to pressure and withdraw a prize from a writer who is exercising her freedom of conscience and freedom of expression.

“And it is a matter of outrage that the BDS movement (modelled on the South African boycott) that campaigns against the government of Israel for its acts of discrimination and brutality against Palestinians should be held up as something shameful and unjust,” she said.

She told Middle East Eye that she asked the jurors to include her response in their statement but they refused.

Earlier this year Germany’s federal parliament passed a non-binding motion branding BDS anti-semitic. It said the campaign used “patterns and methods” used by nazis during the Holocaust.

This legislation has since been used to stifle freedom of speech and close down meetings of Palestinian speakers and activists across Germany.

But earlier this week a Cologne court ruled that the exclusion of the German-Palestinian Women’s Association from the Bonn cultural festival, based on the group’s support for BDS, constituted “unequal treatment” and a breach of the law.