BookRising

Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela spoke with host Bhakti Shringarpure about East African and Sudanese literature, about Abdulrazak Gurnah's Nobel prize win, on writing about Muslim lives and Muslim cultures, and the ways in which the exciting shifts in readership across the Muslim world are shifting publishing paradigms. She commented on the ways in which the events of 9/11 and the ensuing wars alter...

Meg Arenberg is joined by Kenyan novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor to celebrate the momentous occasion of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize, in her words, "a family win." Owuor talks about Gurnah the man and the mentor, the textures of his writing and how it has influenced her own, and reflects on the cartographic imagination that nourishes both poetry and prose born from the Swahili seas. The conversa...

Ainehi Edoro (founder and editor-on-chief of Brittle Paper) & Bhakti Shringarpure (creative director of the Radical Books Collective) decided to break down the power, prestige, history and significance of the Booker Prize. They also discussed the six nominated novels and revealed their favorites. With the Booker prize announcements only one week away, Edoro and Shringarpure will soon find out...

Meg Arenberg speaks with Swahili poet and journalist Mohammed Ghassani about how fellow Zanzibaris have received the news of Abdulrazak Gurnah's Nobel prize, Ghassani's experience living abroad, and how the themes of alienation and longing in Gurnah's novels overlap with Ghassani's poetry, in particular his collection N'na Kwetu (I Have a Home, There is a We), which won him the first Mabati Cornel...

On October 23rd, 2021, we organized our first Radical Foundations seminar on B.R Ambedkar's "Annihilation of Caste." This groundbreaking text was originally written in 1936 as a speech which Ambedkar was subsequently forbidden from delivering. He went on to self-publish it and it soon became a powerful and gut-wrenching indictment of India's caste system rooted in the violence of Hindu scriptures....