Arab Futurism
in partnership with the Arab British Centre
Price: 5.00
Arab British Centre, 1 Gough Square, London EC4A 3DE
About the event
The best science fiction says more about the time in which it's written than the future it's claiming to predict…
Our Futures Past series features stories set 100 years after a seismic national event, whether the Nakba in Palestine (1948) or the 2011 Revolution in Egypt. At this event, you'll hear from contributors to three of these collections on their stories and what it means to imagine the future of Arab nations. Palestine + 100 editor Basma Ghalayini will be joined by Raph Cormack and Ahmed Naji (Egypt + 100), Selma Dabbagh (Palestine + 100) and Hassan Abdulrazzak (Iraq + 100). This event is held in partnership with the Arab British Centre.
Tickets available via eventbrite now!
Meet the Speakers
Hassan Abdulrazzak is of Iraqi origin, born in Prague and living in London. His plays include The Special Relationship (Soho Theatre, 2020), And Here I Am (Arcola Theatre, 2017 and touring) and Love, Bombs and Apples (Arcola Theatre, 2016 and UK tour; Golden Thread, San Francisco, 2018 followed by a second UK tour; Kennedy Centre, Washington DC, 2019), among others. Hassan has translated numerous Arabic plays to English by playwrights such as Jawad Al-Assadi, Hanane Hajjali, Wael Qadour and Mudar Alhaggi. His contribution to anthologies include A Country to Call Home (Unbound, 2018), Don't Panic, I'm Islamic (Saqi Books, 2017), Iraq+100: Stories from a century after the invasion (Comma Press, 2016) and A Country of Refuge (Unbound, 2016). His new play ‘Chambers of the Heart’ will be performed on 19 and 20 July 2024 at the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival. He is the recipient of George Devine, Meyer-Whitworth, Pearson theatre awards as well as the Arab British Centre Award for Culture. The script of his short film ‘A Night of Gharam’ won the Unsolicited Scripts Short Film Grant 2022.
Raphael Cormack is Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Durham. He is the author of Midnight in Cairo a book about the women of Egypt's 1920s nightlife and is working on a book about the global occult in the 1920s. He edited The Book of Khartoum and The Book of Cairo for Comma Press.
Ahmed Naji is a bilingual writer, journalist, documentary filmmaker, and official criminal from Egypt. His novels are: Rogers (2007), Using Life
(2014), And Tigers to My Room (2020), Happy Endings (2023), and most recently a memoir, Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in Prison (McSweeney’s, 2023). He was also a finalist at the National Book Critic Circle.
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction and a lawyer. Her first novel Out of It (Bloomsbury, 2011) was mainly set in Gaza. She is also the editor of We Wrote in Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers (Saqi, 2021). She contributed a story to Palestine +100 that was also developed into a play by WDR (German radio). She is also a lawyer, having worked in the fields of international human rights and criminal law for NGOs in Palestine, Egypt and the UK. She has a PhD in creative writing from Goldsmiths University and an LLM from SOAS.
