CultureTrip to Sudan
Wed, 30 Jun 2021 18:00 - 20:00 British Summer Time (UTC+1)
Register here.
Glean Club trip is taking you to Sudan, with writer Leila Aboulela as a guide through the storytelling of her Elsewhere, Home book.
About this event
***Update***
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event is being rescheduled. We apologise for any inconvenience caused and we hope that you can make the new date.
The journey will begin with the book Elsewhere, Home, which has won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2018. We will talk about the book and then further dive into the local culture with Sudan.
Get your book here – support independent bookshops:
Saqqi books (e-book & paperback)
Bookshop.org (paperback)
Hive.co.uk (e-book & paperback)
About the book:
Leila Aboulela’s “Elsewhere, Home” offers us a rich tableau of life as an immigrant abroad. A young woman’s encounter with a former classmate elicits painful reminders of her former life in Khartoum. A wealthy Sudanese student in Aberdeen begins an unlikely friendship with a Scottish man. A woman experiences an evolving relationship to her favourite writer, whose portrait of their shared culture both reflects and conflicts with her own sense of identity.
Shuttling between the dusty, sun-baked streets of Khartoum and the university halls and cramped apartments of Aberdeen and London, Elsewhere, Home explores, with subtlety and restraint, the profound feelings of yearning, loss and alienation that come with leaving one’s homeland in pursuit of a different life.
About the author:
Leila Aboulela is a Sudanese-born writer whose work, written in English, has received critical acclaim and a high profile for its distinctive exploration of identity, migration and Islamic spirituality. Highlighting the challenges facing Muslims in Europe and “telling the stories of flawed complex characters who struggle to make choices using Muslim logic”, Aboulela’s work explores significant political issues.
Her personal faith and the move, in her mid-20s, from Sudan to Scotland are a major influence on her work. Literary influences include Arab authors Tayeb Salih and Naguib Mahfouz as well as Ahdaf Soueif, Jean Rhys, Anita Desai and Doris Lessing. The Scottish literary landscape and writers such as Alan Spence and Robin Jenkins have also been influential.
Leila Aboulela’s works have been included in cultural educational programs supported by the British Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US. Her restrained lyricism, irony and clarity has received praise from Nobel Prize winner J.M Coetzee, Ben Okri and Ali Smith.
See more about Leila here.
