Autofiction Workshop in Cardiff — Durre Shahwar
Wasafiri is excited to announce that Writer-in-Residence Durre Shahwar's final workshop, Autofiction: Bearing Witness, will take place live in partnership with Dyddiau Du, Cardiff, Wales on 15 April 2023.
Autofiction: Bearing Witness
Writing has often been a means of bearing witness. This workshop will look at how autofiction allows us to capture and record events and moments of personal significance. Note-taking, archiving, or even social media can arguably be a form of autofiction that can be drawn upon by anyone, regardless of whether they are a writer or not. We will also consider how the ‘auto’ can be placed within wider cultural and social issues of the past and the present and look at different ways of capturing, from a short film to prose extracts, inspired by works such as The White Book by Han Kang (2016), Bluets by Maggie Nelson (2009), and others.
In 2017, when I started running ‘Where I’m Coming From’, which was a community-focused monthly open mic event dedicated to platforming writers of colour, I realised how special the Cardiff’ writing community is. We have a way of creating nurturing and safe environments for everyone. So I am looking forward to coming full circle and delivering this final workshop in my hometown with some of those writers and communities.
When: Saturday 15 April 2023, 2-4pm GMT
Where: Dyddiau Du, Capitol Centre, Cardiff, CF10 2HQ
Tickets: Pay What You Can (£0-£25, suggested amount £6); or Workshop with a copy of Wasafiri 112 or 113, £12.
Buy Tickets
_________________________________________________________________________________
Durre Shahwar is a writer and AHRC-funded PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. She is the co-editor of Gathering, an essay anthology of nature writing by women of colour (forthcoming 2024 with 404 Ink) and also the co-editor of Just So You Know (Parthian Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in Wasafiri, Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class (Dead Ink Books), We Shall Fight Until We Win (404 Ink), Welsh (Plural) (Repeater Books). Durre is the co-founder of ‘Where I’m Coming From’, an open mic collective that platformed underrepresented writers in Wales. She is currently a Future Wales Fellow, looking at the impact of climate change on everyday life through writing and art. Durre is working on her first book of narrative non-fiction about language, belonging, and identity as a Pakistani-Welsh person, a sample of which was shortlisted and highly commended for the Morley Lit Prize 2022.
You can read Durre Shahwar's 'The Golden Books', first published in Wasafiri 112: Reimagining Education, which is available to purchase in the Wasafiri shop.
