Spring Literature Festival Cultural Confluences Saturday, 7 March 2015 10am - 8pm

CENTRES & PROGRAMMES OFFICE SOAS, University of London Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG www.soas.ac.uk Culture is one of the most complex and contested words in the dictionary. With meanings encompassing both artistic endeavour and the broader fabric of everyday life, culture has recently been a site of conflict; it has been elevated to a definitive marker of identity by some, while cultural difference has been cited by others as the main source of dissension and conflict in the world today.

This one-day literary festival brings together writers from a number of cultural background, all of whom have interrogated in their work the nature of culture and intercultural experience. As well as forming their subject matter, culture envelops the processes by which their work is circulated and consumed. Their experience as creators of culture also gives them a unique insight into the processes and pitfalls of producing literary art in the modern world.

At the Spring Literature festival writers will read from and be in conversation about their recent publications. Books will be available for purchase on the day. Spring Literature Festival Cultural Confluences Programme

Time Feature 10.00 Registration

10.10 Welcome

10.15 Panel 1: Conflicted memories: contested territories Naomi Foyle, Sadaf Saaz, Mirza Waheed

11.15 Panel 2: New Voices: Interconnections, consonances Ahsan Akbar, Somnath Batabyal, Minoli Salgado

12.15 Lunch and Music

13.15 Panel 3: ‘Fear, Fun And The Deep State: ‘ some scenes and thoughts about the arrest of Ai Wewei’ Playwright Howard Brenton reads from his play #Ai Weiwei, performed in 2013 at the Hampstead theatre, and considers the implications of Ai Weiwei’s account of his arrest and interrogation. How do state powers ‘manipulate free expression’?

14:15 Coffee Break and Music

14.30 Panel 4: Notes, Postcards and poems Alev Adil, Aamer Hussein, Laksmi Pamuntjak

15.30 Panel 5: Debatable Land Ikhtisad Ahmed, Rukhsana Ahmad, Tariq Mehmood

16.30 Listening Session with DJ Omer Tariq with tasters from classical to folk and pop music ranging from a selection of Khayal, ghazal Qawwali.

 18:00 Ganaa Bajana in the Junior Common Room with our resident DJ spinning Pakistani pop classics with a selection of folk and contemporary tracks. The evening will kick off with a spoken word performance bySascha Aurora Akhtar, and others. Dr Alev Adil is Artist in Residence at the University of Greenwich where she is also Principal Lecturer in visual culture and creative writing. She has performed her poetry at a number of venues in London including the Queen’s House at the Maritime Museum, the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain, the Hampstead Theatre, the British Museum and internationally in Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cyprus, France, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Kosovo, Lithuania, Mexico, Romania, Turkey and the UK. She has been widely published in poetry anthologies, academic and literary journals and has reviewed for The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Agenda and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her academic publications include research into the poetics of memory, transnational literatures and literature in translation. Alev also curates http//www.MemoryMap.org.uk an online digital memory project and exhibition space for film, photography, writing and music, where she archives her performances.

Ikhtisad Ahmed is a human rights lawyer turned writer based in London. He is the author of the popular weekly current affairs and politics column, “From the Margins”, in Dhaka Tribune, and the critically acclaimed Theatre of the Absurd fable in three acts, The Deliverance of Sanctuary. His book of poems, Requiem, out at Hay Festival Dhaka 2014, follows his 2009 sold- out collection, Cryptic Verses. The Bangladeshi’s second play, Esne in Taberna, is a two-act absurdist satire about the Occupy movement that is presently in development. Shortlisted for the H. G. Wells Competition 2014, he is currently compiling a short story collection, due to be released later this year. He will be serving a residency at CAST in Doncaster this summer to research and develop a play about Bangladesh’s garments industry, and continues to run workshops and programmes about theatre and writing for participants who do not have access to these. Ikhtisad hopes to give a voice to the oppressed, the marginalised and the forgotten through his writing. | www.ikhtisadahmed.com|

Rukhsana Ahmad has written and adapted several plays for the stage and radio, achieving distinction in both. Her play River on Fire was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn International Prize. Her first novel, The Hope Chest, was published by Virago. We Sinful Women, her pioneering translation of Urdu feminist poetry, is widely acclaimed. Rukhsana is a co-founder of Kali Theatre Company, London. She has served as a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund at Queen Mary’s, University of London. The Gatekeeper’s Wife and other stories was published in 2014. Ahsan Akbar grew up in Dhaka and studied at Exeter. He worked as a bookseller, vinyl record seller, and as an equities trader in London and Southeast Asia. His debut book, The Devil’s Thumbprint, is a collection of poems.

He is a producer of Hay Festival Dhaka and board member of Bengal Lights, Bangladesh’s most prominent new English literary journal. He is co-founder of Zephyr:Media, an arts and media portal in the UK, and is at work on a novel.

Somnath Batabyal worked for a decade in Indian journalism, covering crime and criminality, hobnobbing with politicians and policemen, before entering the quieter world of Western academia. His first novel, The Price You Pay, (HarperCollins, 2013) set in the murky underbelly of contemporary Delhi received critical acclaim and is now being made into a Bollywood film. He lives in London where he teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Batabyal is currently working on his second work of fiction.

Howard Brenton is a playwright. He was born in Portsmouth in 1942. He has written over fifty plays. The most recent are Never Good So Good (National Theatre, 2008); Anne Boleyn (Shakespeare’s Globe, 2010 revived in 2011 and toured in 2012); 55 Days (Hampstead Theatre 2012); #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei (Hampstead Theatre 2013); Drawing the Line (Hampstead Theatre 2013) and Doctor Scroggy’s War (Shakespeare’s Globe 2014).

Naomi Foyle is an British-Canadian writer, poet and lecturer, and the co-ordinator of British Writers in Support of Palestine (BWISP). She has published several collections of poetry and three SF novels. Seoul Survivors (2013) is a cyberchiller set in South Korea. The Gaia Chronicles - Astra (2014), Rook Song (2015) and The Blood of the Hoopoe (forthcoming 2016) - are science fantasies set in a post- fossil fuel parallel Mesopotamia. Aamer Hussein was born and brought up in Karachi, and moved to England in 1970 at the age of 15. A graduate of SOAS, where he studied Farsi with Professor Lambton, he later studied languages and philosophy. He is the author of six volumes of short stories, a novel, and a novella. He writes in both English and Urdu. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Southampton.

Tariq Mehmood is an award winning writer and film-maker. His books include Hand On the Sun (Penguin), While There Is Light (Comma). He co-directed the award-winning documentary Injustice. He currently teaches at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon and lives in Beirut and Manchester.

Laksmi Pamuntjak is the author of two collections of poetry (one of which was recommended on the pages of the 2005 Herald UK Books of the Year), a treatise on the relationship between man and violence based on the Iliad, a collection of short stories, four editions of the best-selling and award-winning Jakarta Good Food Guide and two novels, Amba and Aruna dan Lidahnya, both national bestsellers.

Co-founder of Aksara Bookstore, Pamuntjak has participated in numerous international literary events while her poems, short stories and essays have been published in many international journals. In 2012 she was selected as the Indonesian representative at the Poetry Parnassus/Cultural Olympiad in London, held in conjunction with the London Olympics. Her first novel,Amba , has been translated into English under the title The Question of Red and will be published in German in September 2015 by Ullstein Verlag. Sadaf Saaz is a poet, writer, activist and entrepreneur. She lives in Dhaka, where she runs a travel and arts management company, Jatrik. She is also Festival Director and co-founder of Hay Festival Dhaka. Her debut poetry collection, Sari Reams, was published in 2013 by UPL.

Minoli Salgado is a writer and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. She has published widely in postcolonial literature and is the author of Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (2007). In 2012 she represented Sri Lanka in London’s Poetry Parnassus, part of the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012, and won the inaugural SI Leeds Literary Prize for her debut novel, A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014).

Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Kashmir. His debut novel The Collaborator was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat Prize, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. It was also book of the year for The Telegraph, New Statesman, Financial Times, Business Standard and Telegraph India. Waheed has written for the BBC, the Guardian, Granta, Al Jazeera English and The New York Times. He lives in London and his second novel, The Book of Gold Leaves was published last year by Viking, Penguin Spring Literature Festival Cultural Confluences

#SpringlitFest

Centre for the Study of Pakistan www.soas.ac.uk/csp @SOASCentres /Pakistan.SOAS

Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue www.muslimstrustdialogue.org @MTCDialogue pages/Muslims-Trust-and-Cultural-Dialogue/335128759936716

UEL www.uel.ac.uk @UEL_News /universityofeastlondon