The novelist Layla AlAmmar will be our first guest of the 2022-23 Writers in Conversation series when she joins us Monday 17 October at Southampton’s wonderful independent October Books.
AlAmmar will be discussing her most recent novel, Silence Is a Sense, starting at 7 pm with Carole Burns, writer and associate professor of English at Southampton.
Our own Philip Hoare will be joining our second guest on the evening of Monday 7 November at MAST Theatre in the city’s cultural quarter. More details to come.
AlAmmar’s second novel revolves around a young woman who is a refugee from Syria who, silenced by her trauma, becomes drawn into the lives of her neighbors in a set of flats in the UK. The New York Times reviewer wrote: “This is not just good storytelling, but a blueprint for survival: Turn to language even when there appears to be no hope.”
Layla AlAmmar grew up in Kuwait and has a master’s in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. She has published in The Evening Standard, the TLS, the Guardian, Lithub, Arablit Quarterly, and Aesthetica Magazine, where she was a finalist for the 2014 Creative Writing Award. In 2018 she was the British Council International Writer in Residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival. Her first novel, The Pact We Made, was published in 2019. She currently resides in the UK, where she is doing her doctorate on Arabic women’s literature. Silence is a Sense was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
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