Shining a light on refugee literature at Durham Book Festival
Shining a light on refugee literature at Durham Book Festival
Authors from Ukraine, Palestine and Ghana will share their experiences in Writing From Conflict, a Durham Book Festival event taking place on Saturday, October 12 at 3.30pm.
Ukrainian refugee Yeva Skalietska fled her country when the Russians invaded in February 2022. Just 12 years old, she was accompanied by her grandmother.
Sheltering in a damp basement, she began writing about her ordeal. Her memoir, You Don’t Know What War Is, subtitled The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine, was published Bloomsbury and her harrowing story featured on Channel 4 News.
Joining her will be novelist Peace Adzo Medie who moved to Ghana with her family as a child to escape civil war in her native Liberia and there embarked on an academic career focusing on gender, politics and armed conflict.
Her first novel, His Only Wife, was published in 2020 and her second, Nightbloom, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Completing the line-up will be Palestinian journalist and novelist Ibtisam Azem who will discuss her novel The Book of Disappearance which tells of Alaa, a young Palestinian haunted by his grandmother’s displacement from Jaffa, and his friend, Ariel, a liberal Zionist critical of Israel’s military occupation yet loyal to the country.
The event, chaired by Prof Hannah Brown of Durham University’s department of anthropology, has been produced by the young programmers of Turn Up for the Books.
This is a project set up by New Writing North as part of Durham Book Festival to give people aged 18 to 25 an insight into working in literature, the arts and events programming. It is supported by County Durham Community Foundation.
Writing From Conflict is at Durham’s Gala Theatre Studio. Tickets are £5 or £4 for livestreaming.