The third edition of Ananke’s one of a kind flagship event, Women in Literature Festival 2023 unveils a fascinating panel discussion featuring distinguished names from the Arab diaspora, Huda Fakhredinne, Jehan Bseiso and Lela Aboulela.
The event will be live-streamed on Ananke’s Facebook page – @anankemag with the option to participate in all live sessions via Zoom. To attend the session, email: media@anankemag.com
The session, Footprints on the Sands of Time: Arab Women in Literature vis-à-vis War, Resilience, Exile & Identity, focuses on a conversation about Arab women in literature and will kick off by shedding light on the prevailing perspectives about gender and race – in the light of the so-called end of the colonial era and birth of modern wars, conflict and world politics. The session will discuss the evolution of literature by women in the context of resilience, exile, tackling gender inequalities and how especially man-made conflict has weaponized gender. It will further explore exilic identities and women’s subjugation, where each panelist will share perspective on how storytelling (both fiction and poetry) has been enriched through diasporic voices of resilience and solidarity.
Huda Fakhreddine
Huda Fakhreddine’s work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is interested in the role of the Arabic qaṣīda as a space for negotiating the foreign and the indigenous, the modern and the traditional, and its relationship to other poetic forms such as the free verse poem and the prose poem.
She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017); The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020); and Come Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books, 2021). Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly and Asymptote among others. Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghir taht shams thaniya (A Small Time Under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019.
She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
Jehan Bseiso
Jehan Bseiso is a Palestinian poet, researcher and aid worker. Her co-authored book I Remember My Name is the Palestine Book Awards winner in the creative category (2016). She is the co-editor of Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting By And For Refugees (2019). Jehan has been working with Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) since 2008.
Leila Aboulela
Leila Aboulela is the first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Nominated three times for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), she is the author of numerous novels, including Bird Summons, The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her collection of short stories Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year. Leila’s work has been translated into fifteen languages, and her plays The Insider, The Mystic Life and others were broadcast on BBC Radio. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Eminent names from across South Asia, MENA and beyond will be gracing the third edition of Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival 2023 (AnankeWLF). Planned to be held on April 11-12 2023, independent publishers, authors, filmmakers, artists, writers and journalists will congregate remotely to engage in dialogue focusing on new immersive approaches to storytelling, publishing and experiential interpretations. The conversation will also center on the importance of inclusion in the production and dissemination of the written word, which not only envisions to diversify and democratize the publishing landscape, it offers access and representation.
Partners of the event include Zubaan Books, Seagull Books, Zuka Books, Neem Tree Press, Yoda Press and Readomania. More partners and collaborators will be announced soon.
Festival Topics Ideas (not limited to the below)
- Exploring New Pathways to Creativity and Literature
- The Language of Grief vis-à-vis the Dialectics of Freedom & Autonomy
- The Migratory Experience of Language
- Digital Disruption & Content
- Decentralizing the human to realize an inclusive world – Ending the era of the Vitruvian man
- Reimagining Anthropocene: A post-humanist exploration of climate resilience, urbanism, and nonhuman habitat loss in South Asian fiction
- Blurred Lines: On Science, Fiction and Fantasy
- The Age of the Graphic Novel
- Inclusive Publishing
- Publisher’s Corner
- Spotlight
- Illustrated Resistance
- Transnational Feminism in Print and Media
