The Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith is the proud bookstore partner of Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance. Join them for a multiplatform event on haunting as inheritance with Hannah Lillith Assadi and Noor Naga. They will be in conversation with Francisco Robles and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.
A conversation about belonging, place, and displacement that will take us on a tour de force from Cairo to the Sonoran Desert to the gritty streets of New York City.
Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Her third novel Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming in 2026. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a ‘5 under 35’ honoree by the National Book Foundation.
Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, and studied in Toronto. In 2017, she won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry and in 2019 she won both the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and the DISQUIET Fiction Prize. Her verse-novel Washes, Prays won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, as well as the Arab American Book Award, and was listed in the Best Canadian Poetry of 2020 by CBC. Her debut novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English won the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the Arab American Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She divides her time between Cairo and Toronto where she teaches.
Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance is an interdisciplinary research collective and lecture series focused on questions of human rights and the arts in the global Middle East/Southwest Asia and North Africa. You can browse their extensive resources and events online.
