Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan – Postcolonial Banter

06/29/22 • 30 min

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan burst onto the international poetry scene when a recording of her performance of her Islamophobia-excoriating 'This Is Not a Humanising Poem' at the 2017 Roundhouse Poetry Slam went viral, gathering over two million views online. Since then, she has become an outspoken critic of the marginalisation of Muslims in Britain, an educator, and a writer of renown, with work published in The Guardian, The Independent and several anti-racist anthologies, and performances around the world. She is the co-author of A Fly Girl’s Guide to University: Being Women of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism, and the author of Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia. In this episode, she discusses her first poetry collection, Postcolonial Banter. An intimate description of Suhaiymah's turn to poetry to tackle her feelings of exclusion at Cambridge University, and her development as a steadily more reflective artist, this episode charts her ongoing battles against simultaneous hyper-visibility and silencing and the increasing ambition of her writing.

'My voice is the only place I can lay guidelines on how I want to be seen.'

Craft is brought to you by Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary literature. Check out our website, www.wasafiri.org, for outtakes and a full transcript of this interview, and much more from writers all over the world.

**Get 15% off Postcolonial Banter from Verve Poetry Press with code banterdiscount22 until 31 July 2022.**

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'My voice is the only place I can lay guidelines on how I want to be seen.'

**Get 15% off Postcolonial Banter from Verve Poetry Press with code banterdiscount22 until 31 July 2022.**

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Bernardine Evaristo – Lara

How do you tell the story of those who haven't had their stories told? Bernardine Evaristo is a Booker-Prize-winning novelist and decades-long champion of up-and-coming writers. On this episode, she describes her own early career: her years of drafting, redrafting, publishing, then redrafting again, her first verse novel Lara (1997 & 2009). Written in the narrative poetry form that has become Bernardine's signature, Lara spans generations and continents to present the origins of a mixed family much like Bernardine's own. Her first foray into novel writing, it charted a course and explored themes that would define her career.

'I took this manuscript of 200 pages ... and threw it in the bin.'

Craft is brought to you by Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing, and is sponsored by Arts Council England, and Queen Mary University of London. Check out our website, www.wasafiri.org, for outtakes and a full transcript of this interview, and much more from writers all over the world.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

Meena Kandasamy – Women Dreaming, by Salma

Literary translations are everywhere, but how and why they’re undertaken is often hidden. In this special episode, that coincides with the beginning of Women in Translation Month, poet and novelist Meena Kandasamy explains her routes into and through her translation of Tamil writer Salma’s novel Women Dreaming. The book details the experiences of an extended family of Muslim women who live and long in a small village, and who are forced to confront cultural and practical obstacles to the attainment of their dreams. In this episode, Meena discusses Salma’s reputation and importance in India, the way the translation of her work lived alongside major events in Meena’s own life, and the political stakes of a book that some critics dismissed as a simple narrative of tearful women.

‘Translation is an activity of love and trust.’

*** As a special offer, Tilted Axis Press, publishers of Women Dreaming, are providing 20% off purchases of the novel to all Craft listeners with the code CRAFT20 ***

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.