Wasafiri at Birmingham Literature Festival
We're delighted to announce two partnered events with our good friends at Birmingham Literature Festival. Both will be chaired by Wasafiri's Editor and Publishing Director Sana Goyal, centring conversations on place, landscape, and belonging.
Landscapes of Resistance with Tahmima Anam and Ibtisam Azem
In award-winning writer Tahmima Anam’s bold and bracing new novel Uprising, an island community of women enslaved on the Bengal Delta are afforded new compass points when the arrival of the resilient Kusum Khan encourages collective resistance through direct action and the shared bonds of sisterhood.
In The Sleep Thief – translated from Arabic to English for the first time by Sinan Antoon – International Booker Prize-longlisted Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem shows how protest informs her protagonist Haifawi’s coming-of age story: a site where friendships and sexualities are explored, and where citizens refuse to be made strangers in their own homes.
Bringing together two astonishing voices in world fiction, we ask you to join us in fearlessly examining the present nature of personal and public protest, human rights and resistance — and to consider what it means to write and dream with freedom.
This event is presented in partnership with Wasafiri magazine and is chaired by its editor, Sana Goyal.
When: Saturday 10th October, 5pm–6pm
Where: Birmingham Rep: The Door
Tickets: £8/£6.40 (concesssions available)
Voices From Our Regions: Debut Fiction panel with Laura Blake, Manish Chauhan, and Sufiyaan Salam
The English regions: richly diverse environments of narrative and adventure; conflict and character. Yet the stories of those whose lives play out across the wider map of the country remain still underserved by a publishing industry in thrall to the capital city.
Shining the spotlight on three debut novels — Laura Blake’s Birmingham-based Go Home Birdie Brown, looking at the lived experience of a woman caught up in the midst of the Windrush Scandal, Manish Chauhan’s Leicester-set Belgrave Road, a love story of lunchtime trysts and the space that exists between strangers, and Sufiyaan Salam’s Wimmy Road Boyz, a vibrant depiction of youth and masculinity on Manchester’s ‘Curry Mile’.
This event is presented in partnership with Wasafiri magazine and is chaired by its editor, Sana Goyal.
When: Sunday 11th October, 3.30pm–4.30pm
Where: Royal Birmingham Conservatoire: The Recital Hall
Tickets: £10/£8 (concessions available)
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.
Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist based in New York. She has published two novels in Arabic: The Sleep Thief (2011) and The Book of Disappearance (2014). The latter has been translated into English, Italian, and German, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. Azem’s short stories and essays have appeared in several anthologies and various magazines, including Evergreen Review, Journal of Palestine Studies, World Literature Today, and Jadaliyya.
Laura Blake is a Birmingham-based writer of British and Jamaican heritage. For the last ten years, she has worked as the managing editor for a magazine publishing house, and she holds an MA in Literary Studies from Aberystwyth University. Laura’s short stories have been shortlisted for a number of short story prizes, including the Floella Benjamin Trophy (2019), the London Independent Short Story Prize (2020), the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize (2020), and the George Floyd Short Story Competition (2020). She has also had stories published in Scottish Arts Trust’s 2020 anthology and Reflex Fiction’s 2020 anthology.
Manish Chauhan is originally from Leicester, and currently works as a finance lawyer and lives in East London. His short story, Pieces, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2024. He is also the winner of prizes from the Exeter Short Story Award, the Evesham Festival of Words, and the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize.
Sana Goyal is the Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri. She has a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London, and has experience chairing book events and working with small arts organisations. Her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere, and she was a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
Sufiyaan Salam is a writer working across screen, prose, and theatre. Sufiyaan won the 2024 #Merky New Writers’ Prize for his novel Wimmy Road Boyz, based on a short story that came 2nd in the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize. His play ‘White Girl’ was staged at the Bunker Theatre in 2020, and he was a part of the BBC Writersroom Northern Voices group in 2022. He is currently in the edit for a short film he wrote that was funded by the BFI and Film4 as part of their ‘Future Takes’ scheme, and is working on television projects for Sister Pictures and BBC Studios.
Cover image: The Door, Birmingham Rep. Image courtesy of Birmingham Rep.