The Page as Frontline: Wasafiri and English PEN on Solidarities
Can acts of solidarity – including protest and political organising – shape, influence, and alter our understanding and definition of literature itself? Is the act of placing one word after another, in conversation, also an act of solidarity? How does the page act as a frontline, and what new vocabularies of resistance can emerge from it? What is the role of storytelling in liberation?
Join Wasafiri and English PEN for the launch of Wasafiri 127: Solidarities, with issue contributors and friends Zena Agha (Chair), Tahmima Anam, lisa luxx, and Lola Olufemi. Together they will discuss forms of literary activism, and how we can action change in a world beyond our comprehension.
When: Wednesday, 23 September, 6-8pm (Doors open 5.30pm)
Where: Ibraaz, London
Tickets: Free
Dr Zena Agha is a Palestinian-Iraqi writer, poet, and multi-disciplinary artist from London. She is the author of Objects from April and May (Hajar Press, 2022), and her short film, The Place that is Ours, was selected for several international festivals. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Independent, Foreign Affairs, The Margins, NPR, and El País. Zena was awarded the Kennedy Scholarship to undertake a Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and completed her doctorate on colonial cartography in Palestine at Newcastle University.
Tahmima Anam is the author of the Bengal trilogy and a recipient of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the O. Henry Award. Her short story ‘Garments’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. She is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she trained as an anthropologist at Harvard University and now lives in London.
lisa minerva luxx is a British-Syrian writer and political activist. In 2021 they published their debut collection, Fetch Your Mother’s Heart (Out-Spoken Press), a collection exploring tenderness and violence, set within the Lebanese revolution. luxx is also currently studying for a PhD in resistance literature, establishing a practical poetic for social movements. Their poetry, essays, and fiction have been published internationally, including by Poetry Review, New England Review, BBC Radio 4, Al Jazeera, and PEN Transmissions. They have written three verse-plays, including an immersive installation opera on decolonial climate justice – what the dog said to the harvest – and a short film titled Lesbian. They believe in transnational community organising and grassroots action as a means of liberation. They were organiser and spokesperson for direct action network Palestine Action before it was prohibited as a terrorist organisation in 2025. They are a coordinator of the Filton25 Defence Committee.
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and researcher from London. She is a lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths University and an associate lecturer in the Design School at University of the Arts London. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (Peninsula Press, 2026), and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
English PEN is one of the world's oldest human rights organisations, championing the freedom to write and read. They are the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers’ association with 130 centres in more than 90 countries. With the support of their members – a community of readers, writers, and activists – they protect freedom of expression whenever it is under attack, support writers facing persecution around the world, and celebrate contemporary international writing with literary prizes, grants, events, and our online magazine PEN Transmissions.
Cover image: Massoud Hayoun, '409PC – Failure to Disperse (Triptych) ', 2025. Copyright the artist, courtesy Larkin Durey.
What shapes do solidarities take in these strange times we are living in? How can we find and forge solidarities when faced with genocides, human rights violations, and inexplicable injustices daily? Can storytelling play a role in liberation?