Zoë Wicomb and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh in conversation with Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge

We are delighted to welcome the authors to Leeds for the special Archives of Resistance Author Event

event takes place at Hinsley Hall, Leeds.

Both authors will read from their works, followed by a discussion moderated by Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Modern Literature and History at the University of East Anglia. This event has been organized in association with International Writers at Leeds and the Leverhulme Trust project, ‘Traumatic Pasts, Cosmopolitanism and Nation Building in Contemporary World Literatures’.

All welcome. Please RSVP to R.macklin@leeds.ac.uk

Zoë Wicomb

Zoë Wicomb is a South African writer who lives in Glasgow; she is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. Her works of fiction include You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, David’s Story and October. She was awarded Yale’s inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for fiction in 2013.  Yale University Press will publish a volume of her writing in January 2019: South African Essays: Race, Nation, Translation, edited by Andrew Van der Vlies. Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal: Writing Scotland & South Africa, edited by Kai Easton and Derek Attridge, was published in 2017. 

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh is the Writer-in-Residence for the AHRC-ESRC funded Refugee Hosts research project, and the Creative Encounters Editor of the new Migration and Society journal. He is a poet and translator, and tutor in Arabic at the University of Oxford. In addition to his recent contributions to Refugee Hosts, his recent poems include ‘At the Feast of Asylum’ (GeoHumanities, 2016), ‘If this is my face, so be it’ (Modern Poetry in Translation, 2016) and ‘Thresholds’ (Critical Quarterly, 2014). 

In 2017, Yousif’s poem ‘If this is my face, so be it’ was included in a series of Jenny Holzer’s public light projection artworks exhibited as part of the 2017 Aarhus European Capital of Culture Program; in Holzer’s new exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; and (in September-October) at Blenheim Palace. His poetry also featured in ‘The Absence of Paths’ as part of the Tunisian Pavilion exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale.