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		<title>Leila Aboulela</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/leila-aboulela/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Jul 2017 18:19:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leila Aboulela]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=12351</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Leila Aboulela Biography Writing In Aboulela’s fiction, we witness how an engagement with colonial history can help to make sense of the present, particularly the often-fraught relationship between Islam and the West.<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/leila-aboulela/">Read More...</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/leila-aboulela/">Leila Aboulela</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
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<h1 class="wp-block-heading" id="yousif-m-qasmiyeh">Leila Aboulela</h1>



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<iframe class="youtube-player" width="604" height="340" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TVWMNwHdLRM?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-GB&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Biography</h2>


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<p>Leila Aboulela was born in 1964 in Cairo, to an Egyptian mother and a Sudanese father. She relocated to Sudan at the age of six weeks, spending her formative years in Khartoum until 1987. In 1990, Aboulela moved to Scotland with her husband and children. From 2000, Leila and her family moved frequently due to her husband’s work, and lived in Jakarta, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, before finally moving back to Aberdeen in 2012. Aboulela is the author of six novels: <em>The Translator</em> (1999), <em>Minaret </em>(2005), <em>Lyrics Alley</em> (2010), <em>The Kindness of Enemies</em> (2015), <em>Bird Summons</em> (2018), <em>River Spirit</em> (2023), as well as two short story collections, <em>Coloured Lights</em> (2001) and <em>Elsewhere, Home</em> (2018). <em>The Translator</em> was nominated as one of the <em>New York Times</em>’ 100 Notable Books of the Year in 1999. <em>The Kindness of Enemies</em> was the Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Aboulela’s short story ‘The Museum’, about the beginning of a faltering friendship between Shadia, a Muslim Sudanese student, and Bryan, a Scottish student at the University of Aberdeen, won the first Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. The story anticipated the global turn towards decolonising the museum as an institution. Aboulela’s work has been translated into fifteen languages, and her plays, including <em>The Sea Warrior</em>, <em>The Insider, </em>and <em>The Mystic Life, </em>have been broadcast on BBC Radio. Aboulela was long-listed three times for the Orange Prize, now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.</p>
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<blockquote>[Aboulela’s work] dwells on the synaptic spaces between languages, words, images, identities and cultures.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">—<a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/leila-aboulela" target="_blank" rel="noopener">James Procter</a></p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Writing</h2>


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<figure class="alignright"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb-300x300.jpg"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="300" height="300" data-attachment-id="12354" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/leila-aboulela/aboulela-thumb/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb.jpg" data-orig-size="2524,2524" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;3.2&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;\u00a9Judy Laing Photography&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;Canon EOS 5D Mark IV&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;1556031023&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;@ Judy Laing Photography 2019&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;85&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;640&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0.0003125&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}" data-image-title="Aboulela-thumbnail" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;Leila Aboulela (Photo: Judy Laing)&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb-1024x1024.jpg" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb-300x300.jpg" alt="A colour photograph of the author Leila Aboulela" class="wp-image-12354" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb-300x300.jpg 300w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb-150x150.jpg 150w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb-768x768.jpg 768w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb-1536x1536.jpg 1536w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Aboulela-thumb-2048x2048.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Leila Aboulela (Photo: Judy Laing)</figcaption></figure>
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<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In Aboulela’s fiction, we witness how an engagement with colonial history can help to make sense of the present, particularly the often-fraught relationship between Islam and the West. <em>River Spirit</em> (2023) and <em>The Kindness of Enemies</em> (2015) are historical fictions that explore the evolution of the term <em>jihad</em> before and after colonization to illustrate the West’s changing perspectives on Islam, shaped by the specifics of conflicts in Sudan, Russia, and Afghanistan. The works consider the possibility of fostering meaningful dialogue between these two old adversaries through the experiences of Muslim women. Aboulela positions her female Muslim protagonists in Aberdeen, Khartoum, and London as they tell stories of love, migration, terrorism, jihad, loss, and war. Characters like Sammar in <em>The Translator</em>, Najwa in <em>Minaret</em>, or Salma in <em>Bird Summons</em>, struggle to develop a bond with their adopted homes due to the rise in Islamophobia in Britain. However, their eventual success in finding love and home through faith even while living in a secular environment, suggests the difficulty of sustaining a distinct secular-religious binary.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Aboulela’s fiction does not shy away from religious themes. The presence of Islam in her work lays down a challenge to postcolonial theorists who privilege categories of race, gender, class, and empire in their analyses of literary texts, and overlook the impact of religion in colonial history. The post-secular aesthetic of her work, and her engagement with various versions of history, especially in the representation of Muslim women, have made her writing both controversial and compelling. She is one of a number of modern writers for whom faith and fiction are intertwined, comparable in this sense to Catholic writers like Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess and Flannery O’Connor. Aboulela’s characters do not adhere to strictly orthodox interpretations of Islam, however. For Aboulela, <em>sharia</em> is “something personal […] something you would follow yourself. It does not need anyone else to implement it” (Aboulela 2009, 97). Faith is central to Najwa’s life and identity in <em>Minaret</em>, even if she does not always adhere to the tenets of her religion. During her difficult and occasionally traumatic sexual relationship with Anwar, it is faith that helps her: “I reached out for something new. I reached out for spiritual pleasures […]. Sometimes the tears ran down my face. I sweated and felt a burning along my skin, in my chest. This was the scrub I needed” (Aboulela, 2005, 243, 247). Islam does not give answers to all of Najwa’s questions, but it does provide her with a sense of solace and peace.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Aboulela also demonstrates through her work that Islam has been hijacked by corrupt postcolonial governments and extreme right-wing groups who have reduced its complexity to a reductive religious ideology. By contrast, a more nuanced understanding of Islam can ultimately lead to the demise of despotic rulers and egotistical Imams, as Sammar, the protagonist of <em>The Translator</em>, points out to Rae:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">‘One hadith that says, “The best Jihad is when a person speaks the truth before a tyrant ruler.” It is not often quoted and we never did it at school. I would have remembered it.’&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">‘With the kind of dictatorship with which most Muslim countries are ruled’, he said, ‘it is unlikely that such a hadith would make its way into the school curriculum’&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">‘But we should know. . .’ (Aboulela, 1999, 105)</p>
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<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In her <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/interview-with-leila-aboulela/">interview with Sadia Zulfiqar</a>, Aboulela discusses in detail her creative process, what inspires her as a writer, and how the historic love-hate relationship between Islam and the West is portrayed in her work. Aboulela emphasises that ‘women’s interior lives matter, and they know that it matters. The text gives them the space to explore, to move at their own pace, to zigzag back and forth. It is not necessary to leave the world of Islam to achieve this—the tradition is rich, and the geography is limitless’. As the interview shows, Aboulela’s work also contributes in important ways to a better understanding of the Western gaze as it is cast onto North Africa, in particular, and to debates about how we might decolonise the curriculum. Informed by her early reading of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, as well as the work of fellow Sudanese author Tayeb Salih, she has carved out a path distinguished by a subtle engagement with the daily lives of Muslim women, both at home and abroad, whom she portrays in all their richness and complexity.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><em>—Sadia Zulfiqar, 2024</em></p>



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<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Zulfiqar, Sadia. “Leila Aboulela .” <em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/leila-aboulela. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>



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<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/interview-with-leila-aboulela/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Interview with Leila Aboulela by Sadia Zulfiqar (2024)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXo-9DtOWHc" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">A Literary Evening: Conversation with Leila Aboulela, Debunk Media (2023)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/leila-aboulela" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Profile and critical perspective on Leila Aboulela, British Council Literature</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2020/winter/writing-spiritual-offering-conversation-leila-aboulela-keija-parssinen" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Keija Parssinen, ‘Writing as Spiritual Offering: A Conversation with Leila Aboulela’, <em>World Literature Today</em> (2020)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://brittlepaper.com/2023/04/we-need-to-hear-the-stories-of-africas-encounter-with-europe-from-africans-themselves-a-conversation-with-leila-aboulela/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">‘“We Need to Hear the Stories of Africa’s Encounter with Europe from Africans Themselves”: A Conversation with Leila Aboulela’, <em>Brittle Paper</em> (2023)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-link fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://leila-aboulela.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Leila Aboulela&#8217;s official website</a></td>
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<h3>Novels</h3>
<p><em>River Spirit</em> (2023)</p>
<p><em>Bird Summons</em> (2019)</p>
<p><em>The Kindness of Enemies</em> (2015)</p>
<p><em>Lyrics Alley</em> (2010)</p>
<p><em>Minaret</em> (2005)</p>
<p><em>The Translator </em>(1999)</p>
<h3>Short story collections</h3>
<p><em>Coloured Lights</em> (2001)</p>
<p><em>Elsewhere, Home</em> (2018)</p>
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<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/leila-aboulela/">Leila Aboulela</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">12351</post-id>	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Diran Adebayo</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/diran-adebayo/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Jul 2017 10:00:32 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diran Adebayo]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=3100</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Known as Diran Adebayo, Oludiran Adebayo (1968– ) was born in north London in 1968 to Nigerian parents. He is the acclaimed author of Some Kind of Black (1996)...<br />
<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/diran-adebayo/">Profile and resources</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/diran-adebayo/">Diran Adebayo</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Diran Adebayo</h1>



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<iframe title="Diran Adebayo | 2005-2006 Lannan Readings and Talks Series" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/256810888?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963" width="604" height="340" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write"></iframe>
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<h2>Biography</h2>
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<p>Known as Diran Adebayo, Oludiran Adebayo was born in north London in 1968 to Nigerian parents. He is the acclaimed author of <em><a href="https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9780349108728">Some Kind of Black</a></em> (1996) and <em>My Once Upon a Time</em> (2000). Adebayo won a scholarship to Malvern College and then read Law at Oxford. Thereafter he began working as a journalist, writing for newspapers like <em>The Voice</em> and <em>The Daily Express</em>, and for BBC TV and London Weekend Television (LWT). In 2006 he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and since 2015 he has worked as a lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University, London.</p>
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<p>Adebayo&#8217;s stylish, hedonistic prose is tempered by a sensitive, self-critical intelligence that stops it growing tired, or superficial. His sharp eye for current trends and fashions – speech patterns, dress, drugs, music, turns of phrase – make him what one critic calls “the leading writer of the Now Generation”.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">—<a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/diran-adebayo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">James Procter</a></p>
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<h2>Writing</h2>
<div id="attachment_3188" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/diran-adebayo/diran-adebayo/" rel="attachment wp-att-3188"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3188" data-attachment-id="3188" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/diran-adebayo/diran-adebayo-2/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/diran-adebayo.jpg" data-orig-size="1201,1200" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}" data-image-title="diran adebayo" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;diran adebayo&lt;/p&gt;
" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;diran adebayo&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/diran-adebayo-1024x1024.jpg" class="size-medium wp-image-3188" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/diran-adebayo-300x300.jpg" alt="Diran Adebayo (photo: Lawrence Watson)" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/diran-adebayo-300x300.jpg 300w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/diran-adebayo-150x150.jpg 150w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/diran-adebayo-768x767.jpg 768w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/diran-adebayo-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/diran-adebayo.jpg 1201w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-3188" class="wp-caption-text">Diran Adebayo, photographed by Lawrence Watson for his exhibition, <a href="https://www.bjp-online.com/2016/06/celebrities-photographed-with-recovering-addicts/">In Darkness, Light, 2016</a> (image © Lawrence Watson)</p></div>
<p>Adebayo’s 1996 debut novel <em>Some Kind of Black</em> was heralded as signalling the rise of a new generation of Black British authors whose work was simultaneously self-critical and critical of the society in which it was incubated. The novel portrays a fictional alter-ego of the author in a shadowy coming-of-age tale set in the protagonist’s sex and drugs-fuelled youth in Oxford and London. Zadie Smith has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan">praised Adebayo’s work</a> for its self-aware portrayal of the flawed human condition, while other critics have suggested that it <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/dissing-the-brothers-1338182.html">does not go far enough</a> to interrogate the tensions between different Black British identities that the novel raises at its outset. Adebayo’s work is crucially influenced by black-on-black gang violence and racial politics. <em>Some Kind of Black</em> won the inaugural SAGA prize, the Writers Guild of Great Britain’s New Writer of the Year Award, a Betty Trask Award, and The Authors’ Club’s ‘Best First Novel’ award. It was long-listed for the Booker Prize and has since become a Virago Modern Classic.</p>
<p>His second novel <em>My Once Upon a Time</em> traces an ambiguously named detective, Boy, as he seeks out an abstract concept (love) for a mysterious client. This novel deploys magical realist techniques to explore black masculinity and relationships. Adebayo’s more recent work as an essayist concentrates on providing social commentary on <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/09/28/racism-fatigue">race in Britain</a> and he is also currently writing a sport-accented memoir.</p>
<p><em>—Chelsea Haith, 2019</em></p>
<hr />
<p><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” <em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>
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<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-adebayo-some-kind-of-black/">Short essay: Close reading of an extract from <em>Some Kind of Black </em>by Chelsea Haith</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/09/28/racism-fatigue/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Diran Adebayo: &#8220;Racism fatigue&#8221;, <em>Spiked</em> (2018)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-audio-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://www.diranadebayo.com/index.php?page=novels" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Listen to Adebayo discuss and read from his work (scroll to the bottom of the page for the links)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/diran-adebayo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">James Procter. Critical perspective on Diran Adebayo&#8217;s writing, <em>British Council: Literature website</em> (2002)</a></td>
</tr>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-comments fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/fiction.johncunningham" target="_blank" rel="noopener">&#8216;Of Wodehouse and Wood Green&#8217;, Adebayo interviewed by John Cunningham, <em>The Guardian</em> (2001)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-link fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://www.diranadebayo.com/">Diran Adebayo’s official website</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/diranadebayo14">author Facebook page</a></td>
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</table>
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</div></div></div></div>
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<h3>Novels</h3>
<p><em>My Once Upon a Time</em> (2000)</p>
<p><em>Some Kind of Black</em> (1996)</p>
<h3>Short stories and collections</h3>
<p><em>Secrets</em> (2011, edited)</p>
<p><em>Ox-Tails: Air</em> (2009)</p>
<p>&#8216;P is for Post Black&#8217; in <em>Underwords: The Hidden City (2005</em>)</p>
<p><em>New Writing 12</em> (2003, co-edited)</p>
<p>&#8216;Facing Leicester Square&#8217; (BBC Radio, 2004)</p>
<p>&#8216;The Unknown Chef&#8217; (BBC TV series <em>Nightmare Exchange</em>, 2000)</p>
<p>&#8216;Give Me My Wars&#8217; (BBC Radio, 1999)</p>
<p>&#8216;Cold&#8217; (Royal Festival Hall season, 1999)</p>
</div></div></div></div><p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/diran-adebayo/">Diran Adebayo</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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		<title>Patience Agbabi</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/patience-agbabi/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Jul 2017 09:00:41 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Performance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Patience Agbabi]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=3366</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Poet Patience Agbabi FRSL was born ‘waxing lyrical’ in 1965 in London to Nigerian parents. She was fostered from an early age by white parents in North Wales.<br />
<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/patience-agbabi/">Profile and resources</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/patience-agbabi/">Patience Agbabi</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
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<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Patience Agbabi</h1>


<div class="tx-youtube-outerwarp" style="width: 100%"><div class="tx-youtube-warp" style=""><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zJIHXkltvms?controls=1&amp;showinfo=0&amp;rel=0&amp;autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div>
<h2>Biography</h2>
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<p>Poet Patience Agbabi <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Literature">FRSL</a> was born ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z530jow2DA">waxing lyrical</a>’ in 1965 in London to Nigerian parents. She was fostered from an early age by white parents, spending her adolescence in North Wales. She read English at Pembroke College, Oxford and later completed an MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education at the University of Sussex in 2002. From the mid-1990s Agbabi began performing poetry in clubs across London and in 1995 her first collection <em>R.A.W.</em> was published. It was awarded an Excelle Literary Award in 1997. She went on to publish four more stand-alone collections (as of 2019) and she features in several anthologies, including <em>Best British Poetry 2012</em> and <em>Refugee Tales</em>. In 2017 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.</p>
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<blockquote>
[Patience Agbabi] is one of the most dynamic black British performance poets [&#8230;] and perhaps the most radical.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">—<a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/patience-agbabi" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Jules Smith</a></p>
</blockquote>
</div><br></div>
<h2>Writing</h2>
<div id="attachment_3377" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/diran-adebayo/diran-adebayo/" target="_blank" rel="attachment noopener wp-att-3188 noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3377" data-attachment-id="3377" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/patience-agbabi/patience-agbabi-2/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/patience-agbabi.jpg" data-orig-size="1080,1042" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;}" data-image-title="patience agbabi" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;patience agbabi&lt;/p&gt;
" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;patience agbabi&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/patience-agbabi-1024x988.jpg" class="wp-image-3377 size-medium" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/patience-agbabi-300x289.jpg" alt="Patience Agbabi" width="300" height="289" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/patience-agbabi-300x289.jpg 300w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/patience-agbabi-768x741.jpg 768w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/patience-agbabi-1024x988.jpg 1024w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/patience-agbabi.jpg 1080w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-3377" class="wp-caption-text">Patience Agbabi (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>) via Wikimedia Commons</p></div>
<p>Patience Agbabi came to prominence in the spoken word scene in the late 1990s. This followed her acclaimed debut collection <em>R.A.W.</em>, her collaboration with Adeola Agbebiyi and Dorothea Smart on <em>FO(U)R WOMEN, </em>and the success of <a href="http://www.speechpainter.com/portfolio/atomic-lip/">Atomic Lip</a>, touted as poetry’s first pop group. Mixing rap with a poetic style influenced by writers and performers as diverse as Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Public Enemy, Agbabi’s work is inflected by what she terms a ‘bicultural’ upbringing and outlook.</p>
<p>In the introduction to Agbabi’s debut collection <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Raw-Gecko-Press-Agbabi-Patience/dp/0952406713" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>R.A.W.</em></a>, Merle Collins describes her work as ‘poetry in the tradition of social commentary, informed by techniques of the oral performance mode,’ (9) reminding the reader that performance is Agbabi’s primary communication method. Yet she is equally adept at writing poems meant specifically to be read rather than heard. The poem ‘One Hell of a Storm’, for example, relies on visual structure to convey its meaning, evoking the rush of turbulent weather within a narrative of feminist resistance. Her 2000 collection <em>Transformatrix</em> brought Agbabi particular renown and she undertook writing residencies at institutions as diverse as Eton College, Oxford Brookes University, and ‘Flamin’ Eight’ tattoo parlour.</p>
<p>Her third collection, <em>Bloodshot Monochrome</em> (2008), deals most explicitly with themes of sexuality and race: poems such as ‘Comedown,’ <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/28/poem-of-the-week-skins-by-patience-agbabi">‘Skins’</a>&nbsp;and ‘Eat Me’ evoke the transnational anxieties of marginalisation and uncertain belonging in one’s own body and in social space. Literary critic Manuela Coppola notes that ‘as she steps beyond safe boundaries of literary conventions in a creative interplay of formal constraint and experimentation, Agbabi queers the sonnet form, destabilizing normative gay, lesbian, black, men’s and women’s identities’ <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2015.1106252" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">(369)</a>. The comment gestures to the multiple influences on Agbabi’s work and her adept reshaping of traditional poetic forms so as to produce new conceptions of intersections between race, gender, and sexuality—conceptions that are loaded with social and political critique.</p>
<p>During her time as the Canterbury Poet Laureate, Agbabi produced her fourth collection, <em>Telling Tales</em> (2015), in which she satirically revises Chaucer’s fourteenth-century <em>Canterbury Tales</em> for modern times. <a href="http://www.renaissanceone.co.uk/patience-agbabi">Simon Armitage lauded</a> <em>Telling Tales</em> as ‘the liveliest versions of Chaucer you’re likely to read.’ This collection was also shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes for New Work in Poetry. In 2015, responding to the growing refugee crisis, Agbabi participated in the first <a href="http://www.renaissanceone.co.uk/patience-agbabi"><em>Refugee Tales</em></a> walks with Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group and Kent Refugee Help. The resulting collection of work from this project, published in 2016, reflects the capacity of the written word to capture otherwise inarticulable experiences of dislocation. Resistance to the dehumanising of refugees in the media and political narrative is encapsulated in the final line of Agbabi’s contribution to the collection: ‘The story ends where you put the frame: / but however it begins, remember my name’ <a href="https://commapress.co.uk/books/refugee-tales" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">(132)</a>.</p>
<p><em>—Chelsea Haith, 2019</em></p>
<hr>
<p><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Haith, Chelsea.&nbsp;“[scf-post-title].”&nbsp;<em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2019,&nbsp;[scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>
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<div class="resources">
<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="30">&nbsp;<i class="fa fa-file-video-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-patience-agbabi-reading-conversation/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Patience Agbabi reading and conversation, with Elleke Boehmer and Marion Turner, Great Writers Inspire at Home, Oxford, 5 December 2019</a></td>
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<td width="30">&nbsp;<i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-agbabi-reading-conversation">Chelsea Haith: ‘No Beautiful Poems About Violence’, a short essay on the Great Writers Inspire at Home event with Patience Agbabi (2019)</a></td>
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<td width="30">&nbsp;<i class="fa fa-file-video-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBWf68loplQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Agbabi talks about her children&#8217;s book, <em>The Infinite</em>, Blackwell&#8217;s Children&#8217;s Book of the Month for April 2020</a></td>
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<td width="30">&nbsp;<i class="fa fa-file-video-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://vimeo.com/121629769" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Telling Tales Slam: several poets, including Agbabi, perform poems from <em>Telling Tales</em>, hosted by Apples and Snakes and Renaissance One (2015)</a></td>
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<td width="30">&nbsp;<i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://www.transculturalwriting.com/radiophonics/contents/writersonwriting/patienceagbabi/thewifeofbafa-analysis/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Agbabi analyses her poem, &#8216;The Wife of Bafa&#8217;. She discusses her writing process, influences, and the reasons behind her stylistic and performance decisions.</a></td>
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<td width="30">&nbsp;<i class="fa fa-file-video-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://poetrystation.org.uk/search/poets/patience-agbabi" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Videos of Agbabi performing several poems, <em>The Poetry Station</em></a></td>
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<td width="30">&nbsp;<i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/patience-agbabi/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Stephanie Everett. Profile of Patience Agbabi, <em>Aesthetica Magazine</em> (2007)</a></td>
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<td width="30">&nbsp;<i class="fa fa-comments fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://idontcallmyselfapoet.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/patience-agbabi/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Agbabi interviewed by Amaris Gentle, <em>I Don&#8217;t Call Myself a Poet</em> (2012)</a></td>
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<td width="30">&nbsp;<i class="fa fa-link fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://patienceagbabi.wordpress.com">Patience Agbabi&#8217;s WordPress blog (last updated 2015)</a></td>
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p><em>Telling Tales</em> (2014)</p>
<p><em>Bloodshot Monochrome</em> (2008)</p>
<p><em>Transformatrix</em> (2000)</p>
<p><em>R.A.W.</em> (1995)</p>
</div><br><div class="tx-column tx-column-size-1-2"><a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/patienceagbabi" data-height="400" data-width="400">Tweets by patienceagbabi</a> <a href="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js</a></div><br></div><br></div></div></div></div><p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/patience-agbabi/">Patience Agbabi</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">3366</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>Akala</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/akala/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Jul 2017 14:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Non-fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Performance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Akala]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=4903</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Akala Biography Writing Since the publication of Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, Akala has become a prominent commentator on empire and race, both in Britain and globally. Written<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/akala/">Read More...</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/akala/">Akala</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Akala</h1>


<div class="tx-youtube-outerwarp" style="width: 100%"><div class="tx-youtube-warp" style=""><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WUtAxUQjwB4?controls=1&amp;showinfo=0&amp;rel=0&amp;autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div>
<h2>Biography</h2>
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<p>Akala is the stage name of Kingslee Daley (1983– ), a historian and poet, journalist and hip-hop artist, as well as a life-long advocate for community theatre and the arts. He was born to a working-class Scottish mother and Jamaican father in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1983, and grew up in Kentish Town, north London. Because his stepfather was a stage manager at the Hackney Empire theatre, Akala was exposed to the power of music and performance from an early age. He has released five studio albums to date, along with several EPs, mixtapes, and singles. With The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, which he founded in 2009, Akala has revolutionised Shakespearean theatre. His first book, <em>Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire</em>, was published in 2018.</p>
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<blockquote>
<p>Akala carefully picks apart two pervasive and inter-connected myths; the delusion that we live in a meritocracy and the fantasy that the exceptional achievements of some black people are proof that the obstacles of poverty and race can be overcome by all.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">—<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/24/natives-race-class-ruins-empire-akala-review" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">David Olusoga</a></p>
</blockquote>
</div></div>
<h2>Writing</h2>
<div id="attachment_4904" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/benpugh/19358449303/in/photostream/" target="_blank" rel="attachment noopener wp-att-3188 noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4904" data-attachment-id="4904" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/akala/akala/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/akala.jpg" data-orig-size="800,534" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}" data-image-title="Akala" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;Akala&lt;/p&gt;
" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;Akala&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/akala.jpg" class="wp-image-4904 size-medium" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/akala-300x200.jpg" alt="Black and white photograph of Akala performing on a darkened stage" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/akala-300x200.jpg 300w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/akala-768x513.jpg 768w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/akala.jpg 800w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-4904" class="wp-caption-text">Akala at the Hull Jazz Festival, 2015 (Photo: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/benpugh/">Ben Pugh</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY 2.0</a>)</p></div>
<p>Since the publication of <em>Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire</em>, Akala has become a prominent commentator on empire and race, both in Britain and globally. Written in the wake of a resurgent white nationalism, <em>Natives </em>is a <em>tour de force</em> of imperial history and anti-racist critique, and a must-read for anyone hoping to understand Britain today. Akala dropped out of college and did not attend university, valuing other forms of community-based knowledge and autodidacticism instead. He has spoken proudly of the pan-African Saturday school he attended as a child, and his aptly named 2012 two-part mixtape, <em>Knowledge is Power</em>, places an emphasis on knowing your own history and your place in the world (“when you hear somebody’s rapping, the base of it is African […] Don’t let them tell you ‘bout yourself”). In 2018, just months after <em>Natives </em>was published, he was awarded no fewer than <em>two</em> honorary doctorates – one from Oxford Brookes University and the other from the University of Brighton – for his book about anti-racist politics and history. As he joked in his Twitter handle for some time afterwards, he is now “Dr Dr Akala”.</p>
<p>Akala’s artistic career extends back far longer than this most recent book, however. His older sister is the ground-breaking female rap artist Niomi Arleen McLean-Daley MBE, otherwise known as Ms Dynamite. Because of his stepfather’s theatrical work, Akala saw “more theatre growing up than any rich child is likely to”, and the power of performance to make new worlds is a central theme in his work. Akala scatters Shakespearean references into much of his hip hop work; in fact, the fourth track on his first studio album, <em>It’s Not a Rumour</em> (2006), is named after the Bard. As he raps on “Shakespeare”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s William back from the dead<br />But I rap about gats and I’m black instead<br />It’s Shakespeare, reincarnated.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The lyrics to his later track, “Comedy Tragedy History” (2007), build the titles of twenty-seven Shakespeare plays into its first two verses, which Akala wrote in less than half an hour during a live challenge on BBC Radio 1Xtra. In 2009, he established The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, an organisation leading live events, educational workshops, and theatre productions that reinterpret Shakespeare’s works while at the same time “expanding the Hip Hop art form as a medium of self-expression for the masses”.</p>
<p>Akala remains at once an activist and an artist, as captured once again in his epic poem, “The Ruins of Empires”, an abridged version of which he performed live for the BBC in 2018. Anti-imperialist in his politics and anti-racist in his practice, Akala’s is a holistic vision: he has the ability to see how disparate crises are connected by global histories and the ambition to build worldly solidarities in response. While recognising how tough the struggle for these solidarities can be, in his own life and practice Akala has demonstrated that theatre, performance, and writing must be central to any worthwhile attempt.</p>
<p><em>—Dominic Davies, 2020</em></p>
<hr />
<p><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Davies, Dominic. “[scf-post-title].” <em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>
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<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-akala-natives/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Essay extract From ‘Natives: Autobiography and Anti-Racism After Empire’, by Dominic Davies (2020)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-video-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiYI839cr9A" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Akala, Black &amp; British, Race &amp; Class in the Ruins of Empire Synopsis, The Search for Racial Equality, Talks at Google (2020)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/may/26/akala-grew-up-embarrassed-mother-white" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Akala, &#8216;As I grew up, I became embarrassed by my mother’s whiteness&#8217;, <em>The Guardian</em> (2018)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-video-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1v41j" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">&#8216;Akala Presents: The Ruins of Empires&#8217;, Performance Live, BBC Two (2018)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/12/never-voted-before-jeremy-corbyn-changed-mind" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Akala, &#8216;By choice, I’ve never voted before. But Jeremy Corbyn has changed my mind&#8217;, <em>The Guardian</em> (2017) </a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/24/natives-race-class-ruins-empire-akala-review">David Olusoga, &#8216;Natives by Akala review – the artist on race and class in the ruins of empire&#8217;, <em>The Guardian</em> (2018)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-video-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSbtkLA3GrY">Akala, &#8216;Hip-Hop &amp; Shakespeare?&#8217;, TedX Talk (2011)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-video-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCcqS6AP8uI" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Akala, &#8216;Shakespeare&#8217; (Official Music Video), (2007)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-link fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://www.hiphopshakespeare.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company website</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-link fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://www.akala.moonfruit.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Akala&#8217;s official site</a></td>
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<h3>Non-fiction</h3>
<p><em>Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire </em>(2018)</p>
<h3>Discography</h3>
<p><em>Knowledge Is Power II</em> (2015)</p>
<p><em>The Thieves Banquet</em> (2013)</p>
<p><em>DoubleThink</em> (2010)</p>
<p><em>Freedom Lasso</em> (2007)</p>
<p><em>It&#8217;s Not a Rumour</em> (2006)</p>
</div><div class="tx-column tx-column-size-1-2"><a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/akalamusic" data-height="400" data-width="400">Tweets by akalamusic</a><a href="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js</a></div>
</div></div></div></div></div><p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/akala/">Akala</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">4903</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>Monica Ali</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/monica-ali/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Jul 2017 13:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Monica Ali]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=5254</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Monica Ali Biography Writing Besides Brick Lane, Monica Ali’s major works include the novels Alentejo Blue (2006), In the Kitchen (2009), and Untold Story (2011). In each of these works, she turns<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/monica-ali/">Read More...</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/monica-ali/">Monica Ali</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
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<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Monica Ali</h1>


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<h2>Biography</h2>
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<p>Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1967 (then East Pakistan), but moved to Britain with her family when she was three to escape the violent turbulence of the 1971 war of independence. Best known for her 2003 Booker Prize-shortlisted debut novel <em>Brick Lane</em>, Ali has written three other novels since. Before establishing herself as a writer, Ali read for a PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) degree at Wadham College, Oxford, then completed stints in marketing at publishing firms and a design and branding agency. Even though the thought of being a writer had been one she had entertained regularly, she turned to writing seriously after <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jun/01/fiction.features1">two significant events in her personal life</a>: the birth of her daughter and the death of her maternal grandfather. While her first novel propelled her to the top of literary charts and showered her with accolades, her later works have proven her to be a powerful writer whose oeuvre <a href="https://rsliterature.org/fellow/monica-ali/">refuses to be tied down</a> to narrow literary classifications.  </p>
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<p>As subsequent novels appeared [after <em>Brick Lane</em>] it became clear that Monica Ali was a different sort of novelist altogether; a more universal voice, a writer who disappeared entirely within the world of her fiction, confounding those who initially saw her as a mouthpiece for a particular constituency.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">—<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/600d0b24-5be4-11e0-bb56-00144feab49a" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Suzi Feay</a></p>
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<h2>Writing</h2>
<div id="attachment_5255" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/?attachment_id=5255" target="_blank" rel="attachment noopener wp-att-3188 noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5255" data-attachment-id="5255" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/monica-ali/monica-ali-2/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/monica-ali.jpg" data-orig-size="490,360" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}" data-image-title="Monica Ali in 2011. Photo: Mon.Ali.1967 (CC BY-SA 4.0)" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;Monica Ali in 2011. Photo: Mon.Ali.1967 (CC BY-SA 4.0)&lt;/p&gt;
" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;Monica Ali in 2011. Photo: Mon.Ali.1967 (CC BY-SA 4.0)&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/monica-ali.jpg" class="wp-image-5255 size-medium" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/monica-ali-300x220.jpg" alt="Portrait of Monica Ali" width="300" height="220" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/monica-ali-300x220.jpg 300w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/monica-ali.jpg 490w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-5255" class="wp-caption-text">Monica Ali in 2011. Photo: Mon.Ali.1967 (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>)</p></div>
<p>Besides <em>Brick Lane</em>, Monica Ali’s major works include the novels <em>Alentejo Blue</em> (2006), <em>In the Kitchen </em>(2009), and <em>Untold Story </em>(2011). In each of these works, she turns to a different social context to explore themes of domesticity, immigration, multicultural (dis)integration, linguistic difference, and cultural alienation.</p>
<p><em>Brick Lane</em> is largely set amongst the eponymous Bangladeshi community in East London and shadows Nazneen, a young woman who has followed her UK-based husband from Bangladesh after an arranged marriage. <em>Alentejo Blue</em>, by contrast, slips effortlessly into a village in the south of Portugal, and tracks the lives and perspectives of an ensemble of characters through an inventive reformulation of the novel into a ‘novel-in-stories.’ Its form shapeshifts between a loosely clipped-together set of short stories and a novel whose membranes stretch between the characters’ interlinked worlds.</p>
<p><em>In the Kitchen</em> stages a return to multicultural London, retracing the footsteps of <em>Brick Lane</em>, in some ways, but also looks at a broader sweep of characters to de-centre ideas about what constitutes contemporary British culture and identity. Set in a restaurant in central London, the novel manipulates the key metaphor of the kitchen to foreground the contours of this new Britain as a melting pot of flavours—one that simmers its discontents to the surface as frequently as it melds together despite differences. Ali sets up a spectrum of characters whose attitudes range from nostalgia for a bygone, ‘authentic’ Britain, to identification with the changing fabric of social life formed of robust new immigrant communities and movements. In so doing, she offers a carefully distilled meditation on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWrbwbdKqpE">‘Britishness’ and cultural transition</a>.</p>
<p>Ali’s most recent novel, <em>Untold Story</em>, edges into the realm of speculative fiction, albeit of a wholly unexpected kind. Ali imagines an alternative future for a character inspired by the life of Diana, Princess of Wales (1961-1997), who manages to escape the tragic fate of her real-life counterpart.</p>
<p>A preoccupation with the impact of interpersonal relationships, gender identity, and political change cuts across Ali’s versatile literary output. Women and their tense, constrained relationships with men and the larger world figure as important strands in her narratives, as does a fascination with language and its diverse idiomatic uses across different geographical spaces. Ultimately, as Ali has stated in <a href="http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/drama-conflict-and-thwarted-desire/">a 2013 interview</a>, ‘issues of identity, of what constitutes “self,” of belonging and not belonging’ are the pivotal questions which drive her work.</p>
<p><em>—C. S. Bhagya, 2021</em></p>
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<p><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Bhagya, C. S. “[scf-post-title].” <em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>
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<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-ali-brick-lane/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Short essay: Close reading of Monica Ali&#8217;a <em>Brick Lane</em>, by C. S. Bhagya (2021)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-comments fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/interview-monica-ali-worlds/">&#8220;In Monica Ali&#8217;s Worlds&#8221;, an interview with Monica Ali by C. S. Bhagya (2021)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-comments fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/drama-conflict-and-thwarted-desire/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">&#8220;Drama, Conflict and Thwarted Desire&#8221;: Monica Ali talks to Dominic Davies, <em>The Oxonian Review</em> (2013)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.londonfictions.com/monica-ali-brick-lane.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sanchita Islam, Analysis of <em>Brick Lane</em> in <em>London Fictions</em> (2013)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-link fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/monica-ali" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Profile and critical perspective on Monica Ali, British Council Literature</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://lithub.com/monica-ali-reckoning-with-the-insidious-myth-of-positive-discrimination/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Monica Ali: &#8220;Reckoning with the Insidious Myth of Positive Discrimination: On Prejudicial Assumptions About Privilege and Widespread Racism in the World of Books&#8221;, <em>Literary Hub</em> (2019)</a></td>
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p><em>Untold Story </em>(2011)</p>
<p><em>In the Kitchen </em>(2009)</p>
<p><em>Alentejo Blue</em> (2006)</p>
<p><em>Brick Lane </em>(2003)</p>
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</div></div></div></div></div><p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/monica-ali/">Monica Ali</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">5254</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>Moniza Alvi</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/moniza-alvi/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Jul 2017 12:03:04 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Moniza Alvi]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=1797</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1954, Moniza Alvi’s parents moved to England while she was an infant. She grew up in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, before attending the...<br />
<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/moniza-alvi/">Profile and resources</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/moniza-alvi/">Moniza Alvi</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<h1><span style="color: #e00086;">Moniza Alvi</span></h1>
<p><div class="tx-youtube-outerwarp" style="width: 100%"><div class="tx-youtube-warp" style=""><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Pu_WKJRqXJY?controls=1&amp;showinfo=0&amp;rel=0&amp;autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div></p>
<h2>Biography</h2>
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<p>Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1954, Moniza Alvi’s parents moved to England while she was an infant. She grew up in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, before attending the universities of York and London, originally writing in private, or for a poetry group in St Albans. Her first collection, <em>The Country at My Shoulder</em> was published by Oxford University Press in 1993, followed by <em>A Bowl of Warm Air </em>three years later. Subsequent work includes <em>Europa </em>(2008) and <em>At the Time of Partition </em>(2013), both nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Alvi won a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 2002, and a retrospective collection, <em>Split World: Poems 1990–2005</em>, was published by Bloodaxe in 2008.</p>
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<blockquote><p>Her voice is spare, oblique, surreal, compassionate and original. She has unique insight into splits, both emotional and cultural.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">—<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/17/poetry1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ruth Padel</a></p>
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<h2>Writing</h2>
<p><div id="attachment_1806" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu_WKJRqXJY"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1806" data-attachment-id="1806" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/moniza-alvi/moniza-alvi-2/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/moniza-alvi.jpg" data-orig-size="1145,818" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}" data-image-title="moniza alvi" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;moniza alvi&lt;/p&gt;
" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;moniza alvi&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/moniza-alvi-1024x732.jpg" class="size-medium wp-image-1806" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/moniza-alvi-300x214.jpg" alt="Moniza Alvi, 2016, Poets &amp; Players (CC BY 3.0)" width="300" height="214" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/moniza-alvi-300x214.jpg 300w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/moniza-alvi-768x549.jpg 768w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/moniza-alvi-1024x732.jpg 1024w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/moniza-alvi.jpg 1145w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1806" class="wp-caption-text">Moniza Alvi, 2016, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu_WKJRqXJY" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Poets &amp; Players</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode" target="_blank" rel="noopener">(CC BY 3.0)</a></p></div></p>
<p>‘If I think about my work as a whole’, Moniza Alvi has said, ‘I can see that there is a theme of a split, a split I try to mend, it could be between England and Pakistan, body and soul, or husband and wife’. The same word, ‘split’, reappears in the title of her major retrospective, <em>Split World</em>. It is a clearly a world that interested her.</p>
<p>A split can be a painful fracture, a stratification or division, or a productive or enabling duality, and all of these meanings are explored in Alvi’s verse. Split is also a verb, and many of Alvi’s poems dramatize the process of a mind cleaving from its immediate surroundings: a British schoolchild fantasising about a different life in Pakistan, or a woman imagining the life of her daughter upstairs.</p>
<p>Fantasy is central to Alvi’s work. ‘People misunderstood’ her first collection, she has claimed: they ‘thought I was writing about my memories of Pakistan. I was writing about my fantasies. I hadn’t been there’. Poems from <em>The Country at My Shoulder</em> – such as those in the ‘Presents from Pakistan’ sequence – extrapolate surreal fantasies about Pakistan based on the few glimpses of Pakistani life which have pierced the speaker’s suburban British world.</p>
<p>Travelling to the Indian subcontinent for her second book <em>A Bowl of Warm Air </em>enlarged Alvi’s canvas. Poems like ‘An Unknown Girl’ explore the split between British-Asian and (in this case) Indian experience: the Indian fetish for ‘Western perms’ intersecting with the British-Asian desire for an ancestral destination in which to escape from those same ‘Western’ fashions.</p>
<p>Some of Alvi’s finest poems from her later career, such as ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ from <em>Souls </em>(2002) explore parenthood, the split between parents and children, whilst her book-length poem <em>At the Time of Partition </em>revisits the tragic impacts of the historical ‘splitting’ of India from Pakistan in 1947.</p>
<p><em>—William Ghosh, 2017</em></p>
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<p><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Ghosh, William. “[scf-post-title].” <em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>
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<p><div class="tx-row  tx-fwidth" style=""><div class="tx-fw-inner" style="background-color: #e00086; background-attachment: fixed; background-size: auto; "><div class="tx-fw-overlay" style="padding-bottom:32px; padding-top:32px; background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.2);"><div class="tx-fw-content"></p>
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<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-text-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-alvi-eine-kleine-nachtmusik/">Short essay: close reading of the poem ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ by William Ghosh </a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-link fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/moniza-alvi" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Profile page: Moniza Alvi, <em>The Poetry Archive</em>, featuring essays and recordings of Alvi reading her poems</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-comments fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.557196" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Interview: ‘Exploring Dualities: An Interview with Moniza Alvi’ by Muneeza Shamsie, <em>Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 </em>(2011): 192-198</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-link fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126949.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Moniza Alvi reads ‘The Veil’, British Library Learning, English Timeline</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/morleyd/entry/the_currents_of/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">David Morley: ‘The Currents of Myth: the Poetry of Moniza Alvi’, David Morley, <em>Warwick Blogs</em> (2010)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00wrlzw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Video analysis of Moniza Alvi’s ‘Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan’, <em>BBC TWO English File</em> (2012)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.moniza.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Moniza Alvi’s official website</a></td>
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<p></div></div></div></div><br />
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p><em>At the Time of The Partition</em> (2013)</p>
<p><em>Homesick for the Earth</em> (2011)</p>
<p><em>Split World: Poems 1990–2005</em> (2008)</p>
<p><em>Europa</em> (2008)</p>
<p><em>How the Stone Found Its Voice</em> (2005)</p>
<p><em>Souls</em> (2002)</p>
<p><em>Carrying my Wife</em> (2000)</p>
<p><em>A Bowl of Warm Air</em> (1996)</p>
<p><em>The Country at My Shoulder</em> (1993)</p>
<p><em>Peacock Luggage</em> (1992)</p>
<p></div></div></div></div></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/moniza-alvi/">Moniza Alvi</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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		<title>Raymond Antrobus</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/raymond-antrobus/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Jul 2017 10:00:58 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Raymond Antrobus]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=4394</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>A Londoner born in a British-Jamaican home in 1986, Raymond Antrobus started his career as a teacher and studied for an MA in Spoken Word at Goldsmiths....<br />
<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/raymond-antrobus/">Profile and resources</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/raymond-antrobus/">Raymond Antrobus</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Raymond Antrobus</h1>


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<h2>Biography</h2>
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<p>A Londoner born in a British-Jamaican home in 1986, Raymond Antrobus started out as a teacher and studied for an MA in Spoken Word at Goldsmiths, University of London. This degree was one of the key stepping-stones in his journey to become a poet. He began to participate in open mic poetry and joined the capital’s Slam communities, followed by association with similar groups in the United States and Germany. He has since become a founder of the spoken word organisations Chill Pill and Keats House Poetry Forum, and he has received several writing fellowships, including from Cave Canem and Jerwood Compton.</p>
<p>His first book, <em>The Perseverance</em> (2018), intimately explores personal experiences, including his identity as a deaf poet. It won the Ted Hughes Award, the <em>Sunday Times</em> Young Writer of the Year Award, and the Rathbones Folio Prize, and was shortlisted for numerous other accolades, including the Griffin Prize. In 2019, Antrobus was named ‘Poet of the Fair’ at the annual London Book Fair.</p>
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<p><em>His monologues are stunning studies of voice and substance, and his lyric poems are graceful and finely crafted.</em></p>
<p style="text-align: right">—Kwame Dawes</p>
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<h2>Writing</h2>
<div id="attachment_4395" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/35803015@N03/35627467621/in/album-72157683538695061/" target="_blank" rel="attachment noopener wp-att-3188 noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4395" data-attachment-id="4395" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/raymond-antrobus/raymond-antrobus-2/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/raymond-antrobus.jpg" data-orig-size="521,385" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;Robert Sharp&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;1598608165&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;English PEN&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;}" data-image-title="raymond antrobus" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;raymond antrobus&lt;/p&gt;
" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;raymond antrobus&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/raymond-antrobus.jpg" class="wp-image-4395 size-medium" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/raymond-antrobus-300x222.jpg" alt="Raymond Antrobus" width="300" height="222" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/raymond-antrobus-300x222.jpg 300w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/raymond-antrobus.jpg 521w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-4395" class="wp-caption-text">Raymond Antrobus, 2017 (Photo: Robert Sharp / English PEN, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0</a> via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/35803015@N03/35627467621/in/album-72157683538695061/">Flickr</a>)</p></div>
<p>A dynamic contemporary poet, Antrobus is fast becoming one of the most acclaimed of his generation. His effervescent work testifies to the power and sophistication of British verse today. Merging the worlds of spoken and written poetry, his poems deploy arresting sonic effects to offer often hard-hitting social commentary. As a poet who is deaf, Antrobus also often integrates sign language into his performances and grapples with questions of communication in lively and captivating ways. He has an unmistakable mode of address and whether they are heard on stage or read aloud, Antrobus’s poems are impossible to forget.</p>
<p>His compositions have a direct, conversational quality, a feature that owes much to the importance of spoken word to the formation of his career and to his status a poet who foregrounds the power of hearing and being heard.</p>
<p>One of his earliest publications was <em>Shapes &amp; Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus</em> (2012), which was succeeded in 2017 by another pamphlet, entitled <em>To Sweeten Bitter</em>. The latter unpacks the bonds between himself and his late father, who had passed away three years before. In 2018, his first book, <em>The Perseverance</em>, was released to wide acclaim. Named after a pub of the same name in his hometown of Hackney, Antrobus’s debut is grounded in his life growing up in London. Among its many themes, the collection explores his experiences as a deaf poet interested in the spoken word. As a child, he was bullied at school for his deafness and was briefly misidentified as dyslexic.</p>
<p>Now, as an adult, his writing features on school syllabuses and he maintains his passion for teaching by linking his poetry with education. For Antrobus, this is one of the most important facets of his career as, in his words: ‘I felt that I got more education outside the classroom. That was part of why I started working in schools’ and bringing modern poetry to students. He also notes the worrying statistic that 75% of young deaf people in the UK, and 95% of deaf Jamaicans, are raised illiterate due to failings and ignorance in their education systems. This concern is one he passionately aims to flag up and help resolve through both his poetry and his teaching.</p>
<p><em>—Daniele Nunziata, 2020</em></p>
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<p><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Nunziata, Daniele. “[scf-post-title].” <em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>
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<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-antrobus-i-want-the-confidence-of/" rel="noopener noreferrer">&#8216;Reflections on Antrobus’s &#8220;I Want the Confidence of&#8221;&#8216;, an original essay by Daniele Nunziata (2020)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/interview-raymond-antrobus/">Read and listen to an interview with Raymond Antrobus by Daniele Nunziata (2020)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G9dy8nCbuE" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Watch Antrobus read his poem, &#8216;The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids&#8217;</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-file-video-o fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJuIxbSspYM" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Antrobus&#8217;s Griffin Poetry Prize speech plus a reading from <em>The Perseverance</em> (2019)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-comments fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/28/raymond-antrobus-the-perseverance-poetry-interview" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">&#8216;Raymond Antrobus: &#8220;In some ways, poetry is my first language&#8221;&#8216;, interview by Anita Sethi, <em>The Guardian</em> (2019)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005f14" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen to Raymond Antrobus talk with Michael Rosen for BBC Radio 4 (2019)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="http://www.raymondantrobus.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Raymond Antrobus&#8217;s official site</a></td>
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p><em>The Perseverance</em> (2018)</p>
<p><em>To Sweeten Bitter</em> (2017)</p>
<p><em>Shapes &amp; Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus</em> (2012)</p>
</div></div></div></div></div><p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/raymond-antrobus/">Raymond Antrobus</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">4394</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>Nadeem Aslam</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/nadeem-aslam/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Jul 2017 08:00:29 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nadeem Aslam]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=1943</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan in 1966. He moved to Britain at the age of 14 when his communist father fled the country to escape President Zia-Ul-Haq’s military dictatorship.<br />
<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/nadeem-aslam/">Profile and resources</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/nadeem-aslam/">Nadeem Aslam</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<h1><span style="color: #e00086;">Nadeem Aslam</span></h1>
<p><div class="tx-youtube-outerwarp" style="width: 100%"><div class="tx-youtube-warp" style=""><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7MpZIhgh-nQ?controls=1&amp;showinfo=0&amp;rel=0&amp;autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div></p>
<h2>Biography</h2>
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<p>Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan in 1966. He moved to Britain at the age of 14 when his communist father fled the country to escape President Zia-Ul-Haq’s military dictatorship. Aslam attended Manchester University to study biochemistry, but dropped out in his third year to channel his energies into writing fiction. Known for his <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/nadeem-aslam-i-put-my-grief-in-my-books-910441.html">rigorous work ethic</a>, Aslam has produced five novels, a novella, a small assortment of non-fiction pieces, and has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX1mHi_KTOw">his next eleven book projects already planned</a>. He is the recipient of several prestigious literary awards, including the Betty Trask Award (1994), The Encore Award (2005), The Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize (2005), and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (2014).</p>
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<blockquote><p>He writes with great intimacy about […] loves and losses, always drawing us to a larger picture of history, intolerance and power.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">—<a href="http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/nadeem-aslam-i-know-him-vaguely/article18057414.ece" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tishani Doshi</a></p>
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<p></div><br />
</div></p>
<h2>Writing</h2>
<p><div id="attachment_1944" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://flic.kr/p/FkRpnm"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1944" data-attachment-id="1944" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/nadeem-aslam/nadeem-aslam-2/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/nadeem-aslam.jpg" data-orig-size="400,341" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;2.6&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;Canon PowerShot A530&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;1224620928&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;5.8&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0.0166666666667&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;}" data-image-title="nadeem aslam" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;nadeem aslam&lt;/p&gt;
" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;nadeem aslam&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/nadeem-aslam.jpg" class="wp-image-1944 size-medium" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/nadeem-aslam-300x256.jpg" alt="Nadeem Aslam, Grand Openings, Oct. 21, 2008, by kinikkin reims (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr" width="300" height="256" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/nadeem-aslam-300x256.jpg 300w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/nadeem-aslam.jpg 400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1944" class="wp-caption-text">Nadeem Aslam, Grand Openings, Oct. 21, 2008, by kinikkin reims (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CC BY-NC-ND 2.0</a>) via Flickr</p></div></p>
<p>Nadeem Aslam has spent the bulk of his writing life producing fiction and prefers to maintain a distance from non-fiction’s disconcerting tendency to reveal the authorial self. His published works have touched upon a wide array of topics, from honour killings and religious schisms in the global Muslim community, to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the Cold War and 9/11.</p>
<p>His debut novel <em>Season of the Rainbirds</em> (1993) offers an intimate portrayal of a Pakistani community torn apart by the discovery of a murder. Aslam examines how such local tragedy intersects with wider political trends, with catastrophic results for the people involved. The emphasis on connections between local and global history is typical of Aslam’s oeuvre, especially so in <em>The Wasted Vigil</em> (2008), which traces the roots of 9/11 to the 1979–89 Soviet-Afghan war. His novels are informed by an acute awareness of the intertwining of seemingly disconnected histories – of both people and places – in an increasingly globalizing world. Within his works, this consciousness manifests in the form of a richly diverse cast of characters, of varying geopolitical origins and religious temperaments.</p>
<p>In their exploration of Islam, his novels draw upon its religious history and multiple aesthetic traditions, anatomizing the different ways in which it is practised globally – especially in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Britain. Aslam’s writing is particularly invested in revealing the violent misogynist underpinnings of the more conservative aspects of Islam: this forms the crux of his second novel <em>Maps for Lost Lovers</em> (2004), and his Granta short story <em>Leila in the Wilderness</em> (2010). He returns to his home country in his last two novels, <em>The Blind Man’s Garden</em> (2013) and <em>The Golden Legend</em> (2017).</p>
<p>Aslam’s novels are penned in a lush, poetic prose that has attracted the praise of critics for its vivid imagery and evocative tenor, while also raising questions about the twinning of beauty and terror. Not one gratuitously to underscore beauty for its own sake, <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/nadeem-aslam-i-know-him-vaguely/article18057414.ece">he maintains</a> that he uses it to ask ‘certain metaphysical and spiritual questions’: his works are preoccupied with interrogating whether ‘the horrors of the world diminish the beauty of the world, and ­– equally importantly ­– [if] the beauty of the world diminish[es] the horrors of the world’.</p>
<p><em>—C. S. Bhagya, 2018</em></p>
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<p><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Bhagya, C. S. “[scf-post-title].” <em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2018, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>
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<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-aslam-wasted-vigil/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Short essay by C. S. Bhagya on Nadeem Aslam’s <em>The Wasted Vigil</em> (2008)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/13/extract-leila-wilderness-nadeem-aslam" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Extract from <em>Leila in the Wilderness</em> (2010), <em>The Guardian</em> (2010)</a></td>
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<td width="30"><i class="fa fa-comments fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/jan/26/nadeem-aslam-life-in-writing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">‘Nadeem Aslam: A Life in Writing’, interview with Maya Jaggi, <em>The Guardian</em> (2013)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="http://windhamcampbell.org/2014/winner/nadeem-aslam" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nadeem Aslam’s citation for the Windham-Campbell Prize, 2014</a></td>
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<td width="30"><i class="fa fa-comments fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="http://www.bookslut.com/features/2013_07_020162.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nadeem Aslam interviewed by Terry Hong, <em>Bookslut</em> (2013)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/pankaj-mishra/postcolonial-enchantment" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pankaj Mishra: ‘Postcolonial Enchantment’, review of <em>The Blind Man’s Garden</em>, <em>London Review of Books</em> (2013)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://theculturetrip.com/asia/pakistan/articles/nadeem-aslam-cultural-exchange-and-postcolonial-identity/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pratiek Sparsh Samantara,‘Nadeem Aslam: Cultural Exchange And Postcolonial Identity’, <em>The Culture Trip</em> (2016)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9781137506184_5" rel="noopener">Daniel O’Gorman: ‘Ambivalent Alterities: Pakistani Post-9/11 Fiction in English’, <em>Fictions of the War on Terror</em> (2015)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/14/fiction" rel="noopener">Kamila Shamsie, ‘Another Side of the Story’ (on the history of the English-language novel in Pakistan, <em>The Guardian</em> (2007)</a></td>
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p><em>The Golden Legend</em> (2017)</p>
<p><em>The Blind Man&#8217;s Garden</em> (2013)</p>
<p><em>Leila in the Wilderness</em> (novella) published in <em>Granta</em> 112 (2010)</p>
<p><em>The Wasted Vigil</em> (2008)</p>
<p><em>Maps for Lost Lovers</em> (2004)</p>
<p><em>Season of the Rainbirds</em> (1993)</p>
<p></div></div></div></div></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/nadeem-aslam/">Nadeem Aslam</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">1943</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>Malorie Blackman</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/malorie-blackman/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Jul 2017 10:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Malorie Blackman]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=4146</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Born in Clapham, London to Barbadian parents in 1962, Malorie Blackman OBE is the author of the best-selling and television-adapted series Noughts and Crosses.<br />
<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/malorie-blackman/">Profile and resources</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/malorie-blackman/">Malorie Blackman</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<h1 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Malorie Blackman</strong></h1>


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<h2>Biography</h2>
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<p>Born in Clapham, London to Barbadian parents in 1962, Malorie Blackman OBE is the author of the best-selling and television-adapted series <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTEJ4KJh4Ug"><em>Noughts and Crosses</em></a>. She trained as a computer scientist and worked as a systems programmer before becoming an author with her first publication <em>Not So Stupid!</em>, a collection of short stories, in 1990. Since then she has written over fifty titles for children and young adults, ranging from picture books for early-readers to the young adult fiction style of <em>Boys Don’t Cry</em> (2010), <em>Tell Me No Lies</em> (1999), <em>Noble Conflict</em> (2013) and the <em>Noughts and Crosses</em> series (2001–2019). Blackman was the UK Children’s Laureate from 2013 to 2015, and frequently judges literary prizes of writing both for and by young people. Her novels are often taught at secondary school level and the carefully treated themes of puberty, friendship, self-confidence and learning from one’s mistakes demonstrates Blackman’s respect for the intellectual capacities and needs of younger readers.</p>
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[I]t was years before Blackman would address the subject of race directly. She says people criticised her for not doing it sooner, &#8216;but people love to stick you in boxes and put labels on you, and I didn&#8217;t want that. I thought, I wanted to write the kind of books I would have loved to have read as a child.&#8217; These were books with characters who looked more like her, but not books with race as their theme. Most importantly they were books that were hard to put down.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">—<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/05/malorie-blackman-childrens-laureate-interview" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Susanna Rustin</a></p>
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<h2>Writing</h2>
<div id="attachment_4147" style="width: 267px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/?attachment_id=4147" target="_blank" rel="attachment noopener wp-att-3188 noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4147" data-attachment-id="4147" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/malorie-blackman/malorie-blackman-2/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/malorie-blackman.jpg" data-orig-size="686,800" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;Dominic Turner&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;Copyright \u00a9 2008,Dominic Turner mobile 07976844123  email  dominic@dominicturner.com&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}" data-image-title="malorie blackman" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;malorie blackman&lt;/p&gt;
" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;malorie blackman&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/malorie-blackman.jpg" class="wp-image-4147 size-medium" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/malorie-blackman-257x300.jpg" alt="Malorie Blackman" width="257" height="300" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/malorie-blackman-257x300.jpg 257w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/malorie-blackman.jpg 686w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 257px) 100vw, 257px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-4147" class="wp-caption-text">Malorie Blackman, 2008 (photo: Dominic Turner, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY-NC 2.0</a> via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/29377613@N05/3811708192" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Flickr</a>)</p></div>
<p>Writing for children and teens, Malorie Blackman’s career has spanned over three decades and has been instrumental in diversifying representation in children’s fiction in Britain. In 1997 Blackman won the Excelle/Write Thing Children’s Author of the Year Award for her books for new and younger readers between the ages of 3 and 11. Her picture books for new readers feature children of colour, providing much needed diversity in a market that in the 1990s was white-washed, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/british-literature-is-richly-tangled-with-other-histories-and-cultures-so-why-is-it-sold-as-largely-white-and-english-85625">unfortunately remains overwhelmingly so</a>. Thanks to authors like Blackman, the under-representation of minorities in Britain in children’s literature is changing, helped in part by the current trends <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/30/authors-slam-lack-diversity-in-uk-publishing-nikesh-shukla-jon-mcgregor">of advocacy for diverse representation</a> across media and book publishing.</p>
<p>Blackman’s reputation was well-established by the time she wrote the first of the <em>Noughts and Crosses</em> novels. In 2020 the series brought the author into the eye of a media storm following the release of the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p082w992">BBC television adaptation</a> of the five-part book series. Refusing accusations of baiting a race war, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/25/malorie-blackman-time-is-right-for-bbc-noughts-and-crosses-drama">Blackman argued for the revisionist politics</a> of the reversal of racial dominance in the novels, noting that Callum’s experiences are mapped directly on her own: ‘The things he goes through particularly in school happened to me, like asking my teachers where the black scientists were on the curriculum and being told there weren’t any.’ Blackman uses this provocative strategy of racial reversal that is also deployed in two of Booker Prize-winner Bernadine Evaristo’s novels, <em>The Emperor’s Babe</em> and <em>Blonde Roots</em>, using the effect of reversing race to highlight the illogic of racist ideology.</p>
<p>Blackman’s more well-known young adult fiction deals in particular with adolescent protagonists undergoing an experience of rapid maturity due to circumstances often beyond their control. Set in a dystopian world where one race rules over another, the five novels that comprise the <em>Noughts and Crosses</em> series offer a stark reversal of the long history of racial prejudice against people of colour. <em>Noughts and Crosses </em>was Blackman’s first and only series of novels in which she explored interracial relationships and the tensions of racial prejudice in Britain, thinly veiled as ‘Albion’ in the novels.</p>
<p>The characters in Blackman’s novels are usually black like the author herself, but their stories play out without their race being the major or most impactful aspect of the narrative, a choice that Blackman has intentionally made to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/10/malorie-blackman-double-cross-noughts-crosses">resist being cast as a ‘black writer’</a>. Following the release of <em>Noughts + Crosses</em> on BBC iPlayer in March 2020, Blackman refused to engage in accusations that she was ‘anti-white’ saying,<a href="https://twitter.com/malorieblackman/status/1236254921885978624"> ‘I’m not even going to dignify your absurd nonsense with a response.’</a> She experienced profound racism at school and during her young adult life, but <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10743899/Racism-sexual-assault-and-rejection-Author-Malorie-Blackman-still-wont-be-held-back.html">worked hard to overcome these traumas</a>, though recalls a deep regret that <a href="https://gal-dem.com/malorie-blackman-dont-apologise-to-anyone-for-living-or-being/">her first book by a person of colour</a> was Alice Walker’s <em>The Colour Purple</em> at age 21. She has long been an advocate for diversity, facing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/26/malorie-blackman-racist-abuse-diversity-childrens-books">racist abuse on social media</a> in 2013 for expressing the importance of representation in children’s literature. Book Trust Represents statistics indicate that in the last 11 years, <a href="https://www.booktrust.org.uk/booktrustrepresents">fewer than 2% of all authors and illustrators of children’s books published in the UK were British people of colour</a>. Since then, more authors have spoken out about the necessity for diversity in children’s literature, most notably the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47883118">author Sharna Jackson</a>.  </p>
<p>While Blackman is best known for her children’s fiction, she has also had success writing for the screen. Her science fiction novel <em>Pig Heart Boy</em> (1997) explores thirteen-year-old Cameron Joshua Kelsey’s experience of xenotransplantation (animal-to-human organ transplant). This became a BBC children’s television series, for which Blackman also wrote the script, which won a BAFTA for Best Drama and a Royal Television Society Award.</p>
<p>In 2008 Blackman received an OBE for her services to Children’s Literature and in 2013 she won the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/13/ruth-ozeki-thomas-pynchon-kitschie-award">Black Tentacle at The Kitschies</a>, Britain’s literary award for ‘outstanding achievement in encouraging and elevating the conversation around genre literature’. Blackman has been described by <em>The Times</em> newspaper as ‘national treasure’ and has been instrumental in diversifying the face and stories of children’s and young adult literature in Britain.</p>
<p><em>—Chelsea Haith, 2020</em></p>
<hr />
<p><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” <em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>
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<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-blackman-noughts-crosses-review/">Sam Arnon, &#8216;<em>Noughts + Crosses</em> review&#8217; (2020)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTEJ4KJh4Ug" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Trailer for BBC adaptation of the <em>Noughts and Crosses </em>series (2020)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/25/malorie-blackman-time-is-right-for-bbc-noughts-and-crosses-drama" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lucy Campbell, &#8216;Malorie Blackman: time is right for BBC Noughts and Crosses drama&#8217;, <em>The Guardian</em> (2020)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/malorie-blackman" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Malorie Blackman profile on the British Council Literature site</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://bookwitch.wordpress.com/interviews/malorie-blackman-we-are-all-human-beings/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Bookwitch: interview with Malorie Blackman – &#8216;We are all human beings&#8217; (2008)</a></td>
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<td width="30"> <i class="fa fa-link fa-2x " ></i></td>
<td width="570"><a href="https://www.malorieblackman.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Malorie Blackman&#8217;s official website</a></td>
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p><em>Blueblood: A Fairy Tale Revolution</em> (2020)</p>
<p><em>Crossfire</em> (2019)</p>
<p><em>Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers </em>(2019)</p>
<p><em>Chasing the Stars </em>(2017)</p>
<p><em>Love Hurts </em>(editor) (2015)</p>
<p><em>Robot Girl </em>(2015)</p>
<p><em>Trust Me</em> (2013)</p>
<p><em>Jon for Short</em> (2013)</p>
<p><em>Noble Conflict</em> (2013)</p>
<p><em>Boys Don’t Cry</em> (2010)</p>
<p><em>Double Cross</em> (2008)</p>
<p><em>Jessica Strange</em> (2008)</p>
<p><em>The Bumper Book of Betsey Biggalow</em> (2008)</p>
<p><em>Jack Sweettooth</em> (2008)</p>
<p><em>Unheard Voices: An Anthology of Stories and Poems to Commemorate the Bicentenary Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade</em> (editor) (2007)</p>
<p><em>The Big Book of Betsey Biggalow</em> (2007)</p>
<p><em>The Stuff of Nightmares</em> (2007)</p>
<p><em>Checkmate</em> (2005)</p>
<p><em>Ellie and the Cat</em> (2005)</p>
<p><em>Whizziwig and Whizziwig Returns</em> (2005)</p>
<p><em>The Deadly Dare Mysteries</em> (2005)</p>
<p><em>Cloud Busting</em> (2004)</p>
<p><em>Knife Edge</em> (2004)</p>
<p><em>The Amazing Adventures of Girl Wonder</em> (2003)</p>
<p><em>An Eye for an Eye</em> (2003)</p>
<p><em>Sinclair Wonder Bear</em> (2003)</p>
<p><em>Jessica Strange</em> (2002)</p>
<p><em>The Monster Crisp-Guzzler</em> (2002)</p>
<p><em>Dead Gorgeous</em> (2002)</p>
<p><em>I Want a Cuddle!</em> (2001)</p>
<p><em>Noughts &amp; Crosses</em> (2001)</p>
<p><em>Anansi and the Rubber Man</em> (2001)</p>
<p><em>Snow Dog</em> (2001)</p>
<p><em>Tell Me No Lies</em> (2000)</p>
<p><em>Forbidden Game</em> (1999)</p>
<p><em>Hostage</em> (1999)</p>
<p><em>Animal Avengers</em> (1999)</p>
<p><em>Peacemaker and Other Stories</em> (1999)</p>
<p><em>Whizziwig Returns</em> (1999)</p>
<p><em>Marty Monster</em> (1999)</p>
<p><em>Dizzy’s Walk</em> (1999)</p>
<p><em>Dangerous Reality</em> (1999)</p>
<p><em>Fangs</em> (1998)</p>
<p><em>Lie Detectives</em> (1998)</p>
<p><em>Aesop’s Fables</em> (1998)</p>
<p><em>Words Last Forever</em> (1998)</p>
<p><em>Computer Ghost</em> (1997)</p>
<p><em>Out of This World</em> (1997)</p>
<p><em>Pig-Heart Boy</em> (1997)</p>
<p><em>Space Race</em> (1997)</p>
<p><em>Don’t Be Afraid</em> (1997)</p>
<p>A.N.T.I.D.O.T.E. (1996)</p>
<p><em>Betsey Biggalow: Betsey’s Birthday Surprise</em> (1996)</p>
<p><em>Grandma Gertie’s Haunted Handbag</em> (1996)</p>
<p><em>The Mellion Moon Mystery</em> (1996)</p>
<p><em>The Quasar Quartz Quest</em> (1996)</p>
<p><em>Peril on Planet Pellia</em> (1996)</p>
<p><em>The Secret of the Terrible Hand</em> (1996)</p>
<p><em>Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi</em> (2014)</p>
</div><div class="tx-column tx-column-size-1-2"><a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/malorieblackman" data-height="400" data-width="400">Tweets by malorieblackman</a> <a href="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js</a></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/malorie-blackman/">Malorie Blackman</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">4146</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>Vahni Capildeo</title>
		<link>https://writersmakeworlds.com/vahni-capildeo/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erica Lombard]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Jul 2017 08:35:55 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Writers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vahni Capildeo]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://writersmakeworlds.com/?p=1763</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Born Surya Vahni Priya Capildeo in Port of Spain in 1973, Vahni Capildeo comes from a vaunted and controversial political and literary Trinidadian family. As an established poet...<br />
<a class="moretag" href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/vahni-capildeo/">Profile and resources</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/vahni-capildeo/">Vahni Capildeo</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<h1><span style="color: #e00086;">Vahni Capildeo</span></h1>
<p><div class="tx-youtube-outerwarp" style="width: 100%"><div class="tx-youtube-warp" style=""><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r_t2Wu2FLY0?controls=1&amp;showinfo=0&amp;rel=0&amp;autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div></p>
<h2>Biography</h2>
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<p>Born Surya Vahni Priya Capildeo in Port of Spain in 1973, Vahni Capildeo comes from a vaunted and controversial political and literary Trinidadian family. As an established poet, activist and academic, she has resisted the connections drawn by the media to second-cousin V. S. Naipaul, and built a reputation for writing <a href="http://m.guardian.co.tt/entertainment/2014-11-30/living-naipaul-legacy-capildeo%E2%80%99s-poetry-%E2%80%98original-provoking-and-strange%E2%80%99">‘savage, unafraid and hilarious’</a> poetry, focussing on language, belonging and diaspora. Capildeo arrived in England in 1991 and received a DPhil in Old Norse at Christ Church, Oxford. She is the author and co-creator of seven books and in 2016 won the Forward Prize for Best Collection with <em>Measures of Expatriation </em>(Carcanet Press, 2016).</p>
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<blockquote><p>[U]nerring vocal surety and exploratory, many-voiced attention to the clamour of experience, of all that goes through the mind on difficult days.</p>
<p>—<a href="http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue4/AdamPiette.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Adam Piette</a></p></blockquote>
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</div></p>
<h2>Writing</h2>
<p><div id="attachment_1785" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/georgiap/2943915216/in/photolist-5u4WBa-5u4WRD-YimfCk-5u9mzj-5u9mmA-5u9kqU-5u9k1C-5u4VMF-5u9mXJ-5u4VZr-5u9k8h-5u9kK1-5u9mb5-5u4XBX-5u4W4T-5u4VVv-5u9kDY-5u9mh5-5u9mGU-5u4Wj8-5u9msW-5u9kuE-5uWxGs-5u4WJ4-Zfjxu3" rel="attachment wp-att-1785"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1785" data-attachment-id="1785" data-permalink="https://writersmakeworlds.com/vahni-capildeo/vahni-capildeo-2/" data-orig-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/vahni-capildeo.jpg" data-orig-size="900,599" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;}" data-image-title="vahni capildeo" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;vahni capildeo&lt;/p&gt;
" data-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;vahni capildeo&lt;/p&gt;
" data-large-file="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/vahni-capildeo.jpg" class="wp-image-1785 size-medium" src="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/vahni-capildeo-300x200.jpg" alt="Vahni Capildeo, 2008, Georgia Popplewell (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/vahni-capildeo-300x200.jpg 300w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/vahni-capildeo-768x511.jpg 768w, https://writersmakeworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/vahni-capildeo.jpg 900w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1785" class="wp-caption-text">Vahni Capildeo, 2008, Georgia Popplewell <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">(CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)</a></p></div></p>
<p>Concentrating on notions of home and belonging in her most recent collection <em>Measures of Expatriation</em> (2016), Capildeo’s work gestures broadly to contemporary concerns about migration, expatriation and displacement, but is also deeply interested in exploring the details of everyday life. She engages with subjects ranging from mental illness and a <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91725/to-london">Londoner’s commute</a>, to the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91723/investigation-of-past-shoes">meaning of shoes</a> and broken relationships with the self and with others. Malika Booker described <em>Measures of Expatriation</em> as ‘<a href="http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Winners-press-release.pdf">poetry that transforms</a>’, emphasising the way that the collection captures the experience of living in the liminal spaces of cultures, languages and traditions.</p>
<p>Capildeo also works between styles; experimenting in prose-poetry and dramatic monologues as well as in traditional verse and performance. Language has been a central concern in both her careful writing process and the content of her collections: her third and fourth publications, <em>Dark and Unaccustomed Words</em> (2012) and <em>Utter</em> (2013), were inspired by her time working as a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Language’s musicality structures my texts,’ she said <a href="https://idontcallmyselfapoet.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/vahni-capildeo/">in an interview</a>, and her preoccupation with this musicality can be heard in the stylistic choices she makes in <a href="https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/vahni-capildeo">recordings of her poetry</a>. Critics have praised Capildeo for the craftsmanship of her work. Brian Catling described her debut collection <em>No Traveller Returns</em> (2003) as ‘crafted silver turning on faultless glass’ and this quality has since developed into a poetic and cross-genre flair in her more recent work incorporating performance, art and sound.</p>
<p><em>—Chelsea Haith, 2017</em></p>
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<p><strong><i class="fa fa-tag " ></i> Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” <em>Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds</em>, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 17 April 2026.</strong></p>
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<h2>Resources</h2>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-capildeo-fire-and-darkness/">Close reading of Vahni Capildeo’s ‘Fire &amp; Darkness: And Also / No Join / Like’ by Chelsea Haith</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="http://poetrysociety.org.uk/enquiry-vahni-capildeo-punishable-bodies-poetry-on-the-offensive/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">‘Punishable bodies: poetry on the offensive’, essay by Vahni Capildeo, <em>The Poetry Society</em> (first published in <em>The Poetry Review</em>, 107:2, Summer 2017)<br />
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vahni-capildeo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Profile: Vahni Capildeo, <em>Poetry Foundation</em></a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-arts-foundation-in-conversation-with-vahni-capildeo/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Forward Arts Foundation in conversation with Vahni Capildeo</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/19/measures-of-repatriation-vahni-capildeo-review-poetry-collection" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sandeep Parmar: ‘Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo review – “language is my home”’, <em>The Guardian</em> (2016)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/vahni-capildeo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Recordings of Vahni Capildeo reading her poetry, <em>The Poetry Archive</em> (2013)</a></td>
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<td width="570"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwjseXkKAO4" target="_blank" rel="noopener">‘Walking Cities: Toronto’, featuring Vahni Capildeo in conversation with Canadian writer Dionne Brand (2017)</a></td>
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<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p><em>Measures of Expatriation</em> (2016)</p>
<p><em>Utter </em>(2013)</p>
<p><em>Dark and Unaccustomed Words</em> (2012)</p>
<p><em>Undraining Sea</em> (2009)</p>
<p><em>No Traveller Returns</em> (2003)</p>
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<p>The post <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/vahni-capildeo/">Vahni Capildeo</a> appeared first on <a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com">writers make worlds</a>.</p>
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