Books Unlimited: Petina Gappah & Asmaa Azaizeh

Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah talks about her latest novel Out of Darkness, Shining Light and Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh about her new poetry collection Do Not Believe Me When I Talk to You About War.

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Information

Date and time Friday 17 January 2020 21:30 tot 22:10 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 2

Get to know international literary stars and their recent books. Journalist and De Gids editor Fiep van Bodegom talks to Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah about her latest novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light, and Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh about her new poetry collection, Do Not Believe Me When I Talk to You About War. 

“This is how we carried out of Africa the poor broken body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, David Livingstone, so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own land.” So begins Petina Gappah's powerful novel - the captivating story of the men and women who carried explorer and missionary David Livingstone's body, his papers and his maps 1500 miles across 19th-century Africa. The story is narrated by Halima, Livingstone's sharp-tongued cook, and Jacob Wainwright, a rigidly pious freed slave.

Asmaa Azaizeh is a Palestinian poet, journalist and cultural curator who currently lives and works in Haifa. Since 2011, she has published two poetry collections and a poetry anthology.

Tip: Petina Gappah will also appear at Opening Night - A Free Mind on Wednesday, 15 January at Theater aan het Spui; Azmaa Azaizeh also appears at the Free the Word - Oxfam Novib PEN Awards Night on Thursday, 16 January at Theater aan het Spui, and during the Writers Unlimited New Year's Concert on Sunday, 19 January at the Zuiderstrand Theatre.

Line-up

Petina Gappah

(Zimbabwe, 1971) debuted in 2009 with the short-story collection An Elegy for Easterly, followed by her first novel The Book of Memory (2015) and another story collection, Rotten Row (2016). Her new book Out of Darkness, Shining Light tells the story of the perilous, months-long trek made in 1873 by 69 workers to transport the body of the explorer David Livinstone from central Africa to the Zanzibar coast, so it could eventually be buried in England. "I write the history of the black people of Zimbabwe, those about whom nobody ever speaks." Gappah studied law in Zimbabwe and Cambridge, worked as a lawyer, and lives in Berlin as artist-in-residence. She has won many international prizes for her work.
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Fiep van Bodegom

(India, 1984) is a writer, critic and translator. She is editor of Extra Extra Magazine and teaches in the Creative Writing department at Artez University of the Arts. She writes regularly on literature (including for De Groene Amsterdammer, NRC and De Nederlandse Boekengids) and has published translations, essays and fiction.
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Asmaa Azaizeh

(1985) is a Palestinian poet and essayist who became the first Director of the Mahmoud Darwish Museum in Ramallah in 2012. She currently works as a cultural curator in Haifa. She was born in Lower Galilee, the region in the northern district of Israel and studied English literature and journalism at the University of Haifa. Her first poetry collection, Liwa, was published in Amman in 2011, after she had won the A.M. Qatan Foundation Award. Four years later the collection As The Woman From Lod Bore Me (2015) was published and in 2019 Do Not Believe Me Were I Talk to You About War. Her poetry has been translated into languages including English, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew and Persian.
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