Book Launch Leila Aboulela: Writing as Refuge by Bhakti Shringarpure

Leila Aboulela: Writing as Refuge is the first full length biography of critically acclaimed Sudanese writer, Leila Aboulela as well as the first in a forthcoming series of African writers’ biographies.

Leila Aboulela rose to prominence in the first decade of the 21st century for her novels, short stories and radio plays that are anchored in a sensitive and complex exploration of ordinary Muslim women attempting to gain autonomy in a Western world that casts them as misfits.

This biography explores Aboulela’s childhood and youth in Khartoum, her difficult migration to Scotland, and her unusual journey to becoming a writer. Shringarpure underscores the connections between Aboulela's life and her writing, and focuses on experiences that have been impetus and inspiration—not only as topics for her fiction, but as forces that drew her to finding her voice as a writer. Aboulela is claimed by many literary universes; from Sudanese and Scottish literature to Muslim women’s literature, African literature, and Black British writing. This book weaves together interviews, literary criticism, and explores key life events to assemble a vivid portrait of a unique Muslim woman writer from Sudan.

About Bhakti Shringarpure

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and producer based in Paris. 

She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and co-author of India’s Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives (2024). She is the editor of the Decolonize That! book series and the anthologies Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2016), Imagine Africa, Volume 3 (2017), Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018), and Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023). She is a producer of the feature film Nuur, directed by Djiboutian director Lula Ali Ismail and adapted from the novel The Youth of God by Hassan Ghedi Santur, and tells the story of Somali migrants in Canada. Shringarpure co-founded Warscapes magazine in 2011, which has since transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, an initiative that builds community and strengthens solidarities through conversations, events, and podcasts on culture and politics.

Chair

Ida Hadjivayanis, Director, Centre of African Studies, SOAS.

Main image:book cover