Future Histories From The Middle - East And South - Asia
Litteratur på Blå, in association with the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) at UiO welcomes you to a conversation on future histories, science fiction, and the fantastic, in the Middle East and South Asia, with authors Nael Eltoukhy, Samit Basu, and N. İpek Gökdel, moderated by Teresa Pepe. Nael Eltoukhy is an Egyptian novelist, essayist, journalist and translator of Hebrew literature into Arabic, who currently lives in Berlin. He has published two novellas and three novels in Arabic. The English translation of his second novel, Women of Karantina (AUC Press, 2014), was longlisted for the fiction prize of the 2015 FT/ Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Awards. His most recent novel, Out of the Gutter was published in Arabic in 2018. Samit Basu is the acclaimed author of several fantasy and SF novels, including the Gameworld trilogy (2003-07) and the Turbulence duology (2010-13). He is also the co-director/writer of House Arrest (Netflix, winter 2019), a columnist, comics writer and children's writer. N. İpek Gökdel graduated from Boğaziçi University. She travelled to England to further her education on Communications, where she started working at the London office of Saatchi & Saatchi. After working in advertising for several years, she founded her own production company where she produced or wrote various television programs. She still works as a communications consultant and writes novels. Her bestselling novel Karakalem ve Bir Delikanlının Tuhaf Hikayesi (translates as A Strange Story of Charcoal and a Young Man) and its sequel are the basis of the superhero fantasy TV series The Protector, Turkey’s first original series on Netflix. Teresa Pepe is Associate Professor in Arabic at the University of Oslo. Her work has focused on the recent rise of a dystopian novelistic genre in Arabic literature, highlighting the connection between the aesthetic of these novels and the political unfolding of the Arab Spring. In her book Blogging From Egypt: Digital Literature (2005-2016), (Edinburgh: EUP, 2019), Pepe shows how, in the tragic aftermath of the 2011 uprisings, bloggers from Egypt have turned to writing "critical dystopias," that is, novels that project deeply negative vision of the future, but that still leave some form of hope. She has recently edited a volume with Stephan Guth entitled Arabic Literature in the Posthuman Age (Harassowitz Verlag 2019), that examines the use of dystopia, necropolitics, monsters and satire in Arabic literature today.