ESCAPING VOICES by Exiled Writers Ink

The September Exiled Lit Cafe presents

ESCAPING VOICES

Exile enables the past forbidden to be voiced. Writers' voices may become unmuted to focus on the terrors on which they fled and on thoughts too dangerous to express in their countries of origin. Courageous women in Afghanistan escape their silencing through the creation of poetry and prose.

featuring

Douna Haj Ahmed - women in Afghanistan - Viv Fogel - Homan Yousofi - Tamanna Easar - Ziba Karbassi - Rouhi Shafii - Ghazi Rabihavi.

Douna Haj Ahmed fled Syria during the uprising. Now based in London, she has spent over a decade championing the rights of refugees and survivors of conflict. In 2002, she was appointed Ambassador for Refugee Week in the UK. Between Two Worlds: a Syrian Odyssey is her debut memoir.

Viv Fogel, psychotherapist and published poet, has enabled the voices of women in Afghanistan to be heard in poetry and prose. She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Fountain of Hope.

Homan Yousofi is an Afghan-born, London-based poet, multidisciplinary artist, and community arts facilitator. His subjects include local and global ecologies, water as connection and healing, responses to diaspora and belonging, and deep listening. He is currently writing a collection called Water Falls in Love. Other recent poetry projects include a 4-part psychogeographic film series, Bodies of Water.

Rouhi Shafii is an author, translator and women’s rights activist. She has published 11 books in Farsi and English. Her latest book is a collection of poems in English In the Rose Garden (Amazon). She is a board member of Afghanistan-on-line university for girls. She also works with various campaign groups on women issues and human rights in Iran and Afghanistan and runs online classes for girls and women.

Ghazi Rabihavi: Born in Abadan, during the Iran-Iraq War, he published his first short stories and was subsequently imprisoned in Evin prison for political prisoners. After the Iranian Writers' Association, of which he was an active member, was banned, he organised the "Thursday Sessions" together with Houschang Golschiri, leading author of the modern Persian novel. Ghazi's short story The Pit caused controversy and he turned to screenwriting collaborating with famed filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan. In 1994 he was banned from working after writing an article for Adineh magazine. Ghazi went into exile in London in 1995, where he divided his literary activities between novels, theatre and film.

Ziba Karbassi: Born in Tabriz, Iran, her first book in Persian was published in her twenties and, since then, she has published regularly, with more than twelve books now available, both in her mother tongue and internationally. Forced to leave Iran in the early 1980s with her mother and younger sisters, she has since lived most of her life in London. She is widely regarded as one of the leading poets currently writing in Persian and her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has performed her work widely across Europe and America. Awarded the Golden Apple Poetry Prize (Azerbaijan) in 2012, she was chosen by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC, Birkbeck, University of London) as one of fifteen revolutionary poets in a worldwide survey.