What’s novel about a novel? Storytelling and travelling knowledge

"We don't exist in this world. Here, we are neither Germans nor refugees, we don't report the news and we aren't the experts. We're some sort of wildcard."

Shida Bazyar is a prizewinning writer. Her novel Sisters in Arms (translated by Ruth Martin) has been called “an explosive feminist and anti-racist novel about the importance of friendship." It tells the story of three young women who are simultaneously at the forefront of the novel and on the margins of the society they live in.

As women of Colour living in low-income families, they fully understand the demands of a white and consumer-oriented culture while standing with one foot in it – so to speak – and one foot out. Readers of the novel necessarily engage with their view of the world, even though mainstream society tends not to.

Miriam Schwarz and Tara Talwar Windsor are part of a project that is developing free materials for book groups. Together with Shida Bazyar and – hopefully – members of the audience, they will discuss how novels take their characters and their readers on journeys across cultural contexts, and how this can make both characters and readers re-assess the things they think they know. How sound are our belief systems, viewed from another perspective? How easy or difficult is it to let the new knowledge gained from reading novels travel into everyday life?

This event is co-hosted with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics and the CAPONEU project (Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe) at the University of Cambridge.