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Writing Unbarred: Hearing from prisoners and detainees

When: —
Venue: Online

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Join us for the finale event of Arts Week 2022. As political powers to incarcerate and silence citizens increase in many parts of the world, writers are speaking out. The Egyptian journalist and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah in his collected writings, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated writes from prison about his struggles; in Australia, the latest issue of Southerly Quarterly, ‘Writing Through Fences – Archipelago of Letters’,  showcases a remarkable  rich range of new writing.  This round table will include readings and discussion of these powerful testimonies, poems,  essays and interventions.

Chair:

Marina Warner
Marina Warner writes fiction and cultural history and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College.  Her most recent book, Inventory of a Life Mislaid (2021) is an ‘unreliable memoir’ about her childhood in Egypt where her father opened a bookshop in l947. She contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities. Since 2016, she has been working with the project www.storiesintransit.org in Palermo, Sicily, and is currently writing a book on the concept of Sanctuary.

 

Speakers:

Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the best-selling The Map of Love. Her collection of essays, Mezzaterra (2004), has been influential and her articles for the Guardian in the UK are published in the European and American press. In 2007 Ms Soueif co-founded the Palestine Festival of Literature which takes place annually in occupied Palestine. (https://www.palfest.org/) From 2011 until it was terminated in 2015, Ms Soueif had a weekly column in the Egyptian national daily, Shorouk, which she increasingly used to advocate for political prisoners - among them her nephew, Alaa Abd el-Fattah. Abd el-Fattah's book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, (Fitzcarraldo, 2021) has been described as "an invaluable record of events in Egypt in the past decade, of the evolution of a leftist, humanist, internationalist thinker, and of the efforts of a remarkable person not to come undone in the face of overwhelming injustice" (The New York Review, April 21, 2022, Ursula Lindsey, p.49)

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, human rights defender, writer and filmmaker. His book No Friend But The Mountains: Writing From Manus (Picador: 2018), written during his time held in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Nonfiction in 2019. Behrouz is a contributor and guest editor of Southerly’s ‘Writing Through Fences’ (https://southerlylitmag.com.au/) whose title comes from the project of the same name, of whom he is a co-founder. Writers Through Fences (https://www.writingthroughfences.org/) is a collaborative project between writers, most of who have been incarcerated in Australia’s immigration detention system.

Elahe Zivardar, (aka Ellie Shakiba, (https://www.ellieshakiba.com) is an Iranian artist, architect, videographer, photographer and documentary maker. She was imprisoned by the Australian government in Nauru from 2013-2019. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Zivardar is currently working on Searching for Aramsayesh Gah, a short, mixed-media documentary that explores the architecture of torture, trauma, and healing. It features the largest trove of never before seen footage from inside the Nauru Regional Processing Centre. Elahe is part of the collaborative project Writing Through Fences and contributed to the most recent issue of Southerly.

Dr Nadine El-Enany is Reader in Law & Co-Director, Centre for Research on Race and Law (https://www.bbk.ac.uk/schools/law), Birkbeck University. Nadine teaches and researches in the fields of migration and refugee law, European Union law, protest and criminal justice.
Her book (B)ordering Britain: law, race and empire (2020) (https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526145420/) was published by Manchester University Press.

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