"We don't exist in this world. Here, we are neither Germans nor refugees, we don't report the news and we aren't the experts. We're some sort of wildcard."
Date & Time:
26 March 2024
Tickets:
Free
Location:
Frankopan Hall
West Court
Jesus College
Jesus Lane
Cambridge CB5 8BQ
West Court
Jesus College
Jesus Lane
Cambridge CB5 8BQ
Shida Bazyar at Cambridge Festival
Date & Time:
26 March 2024
Tickets:
Free
Location:
Frankopan Hall
West Court
Jesus College
Jesus Lane
Cambridge CB5 8BQ
West Court
Jesus College
Jesus Lane
Cambridge CB5 8BQ
Shida Bazyar is a prizewinning Berlin-based writer. Her novel Sisters in Arms (translated by Ruth Martin) has been called “an explosive feminist and anti-racist novel about the importance of friendship." It tells the story of three young women who are simultaneously at the forefront of the novel and on the margins of the society they live in.
Miriam Schwarz and Tara Talwar Windsor are part of a project that is developing free materials for book groups. Together with Shida Bazyar and – hopefully – members of the audience, they will discuss how novels take their characters and their readers on journeys across cultural contexts, and how this can make both characters and readers re-assess the things they think they know. How sound are our belief systems, viewed from another perspective? How easy or difficult is it to let the new knowledge gained from reading novels travel into everyday life?
This event is co-hosted with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics and the CAPONEU project (Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe) at the University of Cambridge.
For more information and to book your tickets, please visit the event website here.
Related Book
£9.99 GBP
Sisters in Arms
An explosive feminist and anti-racist novel about the importance of friendship.
We don’t exist in this world. Here, we are neither Germans nor refugees, we don’t report the news and we aren’t the experts. We’re some sort of wildcard.
Hani, Kasih, and Saya have shared a deep friendship ever since they were kids. After years apart, the three young women meet again for a few days, to pick up where they left off. But regardless of what they have achieved, it becomes clear, again and again, that they can’t escape the racism that accompanies their daily lives: the glances, the chatter, the hatred, and the outright rightwing terror. But their friendship gives them stability. Until one dramatic night shakes everything up.
Sisters in Arms is a provocative, uncompromising, and moving novel about the extraordinary alliance between three young women and the only thing that makes a self-determined life possible in a society that doesn’t tolerate otherness: unconditional friendship.
