Testimony and the Postcolonial: A Symposium
The event featured papers by Dr Sonja Andermahr (University of Northampton); Dr Lindsey Moore (Lancaster University); Professor Minoli Salgado (Manchester Metropolitan University), Dr Henghameh Saroukhani (University of Durham) and Dr Agnes Wooley (Birkbeck, University of London).
It was followed by the Manchester book launch of Prof. Minoli Salgado’s Twelve Cries from Home: In Search of Sri Lanka’s Disappeared at the Manchester Poetry Library.
Further details
The Great Waking Up – a live event about the writing world and the climate emergency
Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2015) said that writers were asleep on climate change, and there had been great apathy from publishers too. Not enough writers were writing about this oncoming catastrophe and any book attempting the subject simply fell into sci-fi or horror as a genre. Today, just a decade later, the opposite is true. There has been a “great waking up” in the literary world around climate change. Not only have we seen novels with massive sales (such as The Overstory or The Ministry for the Future) but writers in the UK have never been more active and articulate about climate change. There are now several active climate change writers’ groups.
This event brought together a unique panel to talk about why writers need to be awake and active in this current crisis, and what impact can literary activism make. What can writers now do? How can we unite to face the coming changes in our climate?
Invited speakers:
- James Miller, novelist, Writers Rebel
- Chis Redmond, poet and host for legendary poetry night Tongue Fu, one half of Hot Poets
- Leena Norms, poet and podcaster
- Chaired by Monique Roffey, writer and professor at Manchester Met’s Writing School, co-founder of Writers Rebel, and ambassador for Just Stop Oil.
Out of Sri Lanka: The Poetry of Witness
A hybrid literature event hosted at the Manchester Poetry Library with a panel discussion on the politics and poetics of witnessing and video recordings of poetry readings, followed by the Manchester book launch of Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry from Sri Lanka and its diasporas.
Invited speakers: Vidyan Ravinthiran, poet, editor and literary scholar (Harvard), Seni Seneviratne, poet and editor, and Shash Trevett, poet, translator and editor. Chaired by Minoli Salgado, writer and Professor of International Writing (Manchester Met).