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Past Events

Putting People First with Sheikha Helawy, Majid Adin, and Sulaiman Addonia

Putting People First with Sheikha Helawy, Majid Adin, and Sulaiman Addonia

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Refugees and displaced people are often spoken for, or ignored – a position all three of our authors on this panel know all about. Join writers Sheikha Helawy, Majid Adin and Sulaiman Addonia for a discussion about their lives and work, their journeys to where they live now – and the need to tell and hear new stories. 

Saturday 22 June | 3.30-5.30pm
Brighton University City Campus, 58-67 Grand Parade, BN2 0JY

Sheikha Helawy is a Palestinian author who grew up in a now-forgotten Bedouin village near Haifa. She is a writer and lecturer in Arab Feminism at Ben Gurion University, and is currently working on her PhD. She has written five short story collections, one of which won an Arabic short story award. Her latest short story collection, They Fell Like Stars From the Sky & Other Stories, celebrates the courage, resilience and triumphs of Bedouin Palestinian women and girls.

Majid Adin is an artist and animator from Iran, now living in London. He was forced to leave his home country, having been briefly imprisoned and politically exiled from Tehran after his blog upset the regime. He journeyed through Europe, spent several months in the Calais ‘Jungle’, and after many attempts to make the crossing, finally arrived in the UK in a refrigerated van in April 2016. In 2017 he won a competition to produce an animation for a music video to illustrate Elton John’s Rocket Man’. His book, Hamid and Shakespeare (2023), which tells the story of his journey to the UK, is created in collaboration with award-winning theatre company Good Chance.

Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. His novels, The Consequences of Love, Silence is My Mother Tongue and The Seers have been shortlisted for several prizes and awards including the Lambda Literary Awards 2021, the Firecracker Awards, the inaugural African Literary Award from The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. His work was also longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Fiction. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages and his essays have appeared in LitHub, Granta, and The New York Times, amongst others. Addonia lives in Brussels where he founded the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees & Asylum Seekers and the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival In Exile.

Our Sponsor - The Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research
The Brighton Book Festival is grateful to the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex for sponsoring this event. The University of Sussex is a leading international centre for life history research, oral history, and life writing research and teaching. University of Sussex researchers have published extensively in the fields of oral history and life writing, and have initiated pioneering training courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

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