*Sponsored by the UC Davis Department of African American & African Studies*
This event will feature a live international panel with interviews and a Q&A with several fiction authors and anthology editor Sharmilla Beezmohun. It will be hosted by Professor Elisa White of the UC Davis African American & African Studies Department. Please contact ejowhite@ucdavis.edu with any questions.
Click here for the film screening: Readings from Not Quite Right For Us
Biographies of the Authors in the Fiction Film Not Quite Right For Us:
Maame Blue is a Ghanaian writer splitting her time between Melbourne and London. Her work has appeared in various places including Black Ballad, The Independent, AFREADA, Storm Cellar Quarterly (USA), Memoir Mag (USA), Litro Magazine and The Good Journal. Her short story ‘Howl’ appears in the New Australian Fiction 2020 anthology, and her debut novel Bad Love, published by Jacaranda Books, was longlisted for the Not The Booker Prize 2020.
Aminatta Forna is a novelist, memoirist and essayist. Her novels are The Hired Man, The Memory of Love, Ancestor Stones, and Happiness. In 2002 she published a memoir of her dissident father and Sierra Leone, The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her book of essays, The Window Seat, was published by Grove Press in 2021. She is the winner of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and has been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, the Orange Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize and the IMPAC Award. Aminatta was made an OBE in the Queen’s 2017 New Year’s Honours list. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University.
Gabriel Gbadamosi is an Irish and Nigerian poet, playwright and critic. His London novel Vauxhall (Telegram, 2013) won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize and Best International Novel at the Sharjah Book Fair. He was the AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow at the Pinter Centre, Goldsmiths in British, European and African performance; a Judith E. Wilson Fellow for creative writing at Cambridge University; and Writer in Residence at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre. His plays include Stop and Search (Arcola Theatre), Eshu’s Faust (Jesus College, Cambridge), Hotel Orpheu (Schaubühne, Berlin), Shango (DNA, Amsterdam) and, for radio, The Long, Hot Summer of ’76 (BBC Radio 3) which won the first Richard Imison Award. He presented BBC Radio 3’s flagship arts and ideas programme Night Waves and is founding editor of WritersMosaic promoting black, Asian and minority ethnic writers at the Royal Literary Fund. www.gabrielgbadamosi.com
Fergal Harte is a student and freelance writer. He has written over 100 articles for WhatCulture.com on various elements of pop culture, focusing on film, video games and comic books, mediums which he avidly consumes in his spare time. To date his pieces have had over 3.4 million views. After he finishes studying he aims to pursue a career in screenwriting; well, that is the plan at the moment anyway.
Born in 1966 and educated in Gaya, a small town in Bihar, India, Tabish Khair is the author of critically-acclaimed books, including the novels Filming: A Love Story, The Thing About Thugs, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, Just Another Jihadi Jane, and the poetry collections Where Parallel Lines Meet and Man of Glass. His studies include The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness, and The New Xenophobia. Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, his novels have been shortlisted for more than a dozen major prizes, including the Man Asian, the DSC Prize, the Sahitya Academy Award and the Encore. An associate professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, he has been a Leverhulme Guest Professor at Leeds University, UK, and has held fellowships, among others, at Delhi University, Hong Kong City University and Cambridge University.
Leone Ross was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, All the Blood Is Red, was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and her second, Orange Laughter, was chosen as a BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour Watershed Fiction favourite. Her short fiction has been widely anthologised and her 2017 short story collection Come Let Us Sing Anyway was nominated for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and the OCM Bocas Prize. The Guardian has praised her ‘searing empathy’ and the Times Literary Supplement called her ‘a pointilliste, a master of detail…’. Ross has taught creative writing for twenty years, at University College Dublin, Cardiff University and Roehampton University in London. Ross worked as journalist throughout the 1990s. Her third novel, This One Sky Day, was published in 2021. She lives in London, but intends to retire near water.
Gaele Sobott is a writer based in Sydney, Australia who has also lived in Botswana, the UK and France. Her published works include Colour Me Blue, a collection of short stories, and My Longest Round, a creative biography of boxer Wally Carr. Her most recent short stories appear in literary magazines such as New Contrast, Meanjin, Prometheus Dreaming, Hecate, Verity La and the anthology, Botswana Women Write. She is founder of Outlandish Arts, a disabled-led arts company. www.gaelesobott.com
Bangladeshi-born Shagufta Sharmeen Tania initially trained as an architect. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in the Bengali-speaking areas of both Bangladesh and India. To date, she has authored two novels, a compilation of novellas and four short story collections. She also translated Susan Fletcher’s Whitbread award-winning novel Eve Green from English to Bengali. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri (‘This Gift of Silver’, Issue 84, 2015), Asia Literary Review (‘Notes from the Ward’, Issue 32, 2016) and the City Press (issue 7, 2019). Currently, she is working on a novel set during the initial years of war-torn Bangladesh, and a fictionalised biography of a celebrated musicologist of Tagore songs. Shagufta was the recipient of the 2018 Bangla Academy Syed Waliullah Award for her contribution to Bengali Literature.