Writing Through Pain: On Labour and Literature
Wasafiri and Tagore's Salon are delighted to be co-hosting an event with writers Dur e Aziz Amna and Farah Ali (also Reviews Editor at Wasafiri), titled Writing Through Pain: On Labour and Literature.
How is labour performed in a society that is ill? What does work – creative or otherwise – look like when done through pain? In this conversation, Dur e Aziz Amna and Farah Ali talk about how the characters in their new novels, A Splintering (Duckworth Books, 2025) and Telegraphy (CB Editions, 2026), struggle to stay afloat and define what success and happiness mean to them.
When: Wednesday, 15 October, 7pm
Where: Brick Lane Bookshop, 166 Brick Lane, London, E1 6RU
Tickets: £6
Dur e Aziz Amna is from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and now lives in Newark, USA. Her debut novel, American Fever, was published in 2023 and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the South Asia Book Award. Her work also appears in the New York Times, Financial Times, and Al Jazeera, among others. She was selected as Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022, and won the 2019 Financial Times / Bodley Head Essay Prize. She is a graduate of Yale College and the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan.
Farah Ali is the writer of the novels Telegraphy (2026) and The River, The Town, and the short-story collection People Want to Live. Her work has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions, and has appeared in Shenandoah, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She is the cofounder of Lakeer, an online journal from Pakistan, and the Reviews Editor at Wasafiri. She lives in London.