Global Solidarities: Wasafiri at Edinburgh International Book Festival
What shapes can solidarities take in these times we live in?
Join our Editor and Publishing Director Sana Goyal for a conversation on connection and public and private revolutions with Y M Abdel-Magied, whose novel At Sea offers a searing takedown of Big Oil; Molly Crabapple, who tells the story of the Jewish Bund movement in Here Where We Live Is Our Country; and Hannah Lillith Assadi, whose Paradiso 17 is loosely based on her father’s exile from Palestine after the Nakba.
When: Saturday, 29 August, 1.30–2.30pm BST
Where: Venue NW, Edinburgh Futures Institute
Tickets: £15.50 (Concessions available)
Y M Abdel-Magied’s first job as a teenager was in a coal mine in rural Australia. After graduating with first class honours in Mechanical Engineering, Abdel-Magied trained and worked as a MWD (Measurement While Drilling) contractor and drilling engineer across Europe, Australia, Asia, and the US. At Sea is Abdel-Magied’s first adult novel.
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Award. She was a 2020 New America Fellow and her reportage is the winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art.
Sana Goyal is the Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri. She has an MA in Postcolonial Studies and a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London. She was formerly Deputy Editor at Wasafiri, Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press, and Marketing and Outreach Officer at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Poetry Review, Vogue India, and elsewhere. She was a judge for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the 2025 International Booker Prize.
Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of The Stars Are Not Yet Bells and Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honouree and teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. Raised in Arizona, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Cover image: Edinburgh Futures Institute by Jim Barton, via Wikimedia Commons