21 Oct 2019 12:30pm - 2:00pm CRASSH Meeting Room, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT

Description

“The work in progress seminars were varied, stimulating and of high intellectual calibre.”
Susanne Hakenbeck (Archaeology), Early Career Fellow, Lent 2017

 

Part of the CRASSH Fellows Work in Progress Seminar Series. All welcome but please email Michelle Maciejewska to book your place and to request readings. A sandwich lunch and refreshments are provided.

Annie Zaidi

The question of belonging is a delicate and difficult one. It is hard to trace the shape of individual belonging, or to pin it down to a precise point on the map. I attempt to answer the question by examining the remote township where I grew up and other places of ancestral recall.

My personal history is wrapped up with the history of the Subcontinent. The big upheavals and contestations of the last century – the quest for sovereignty, Partition, language and cultural hegemony, the rights of women and minorities, immigration, hunger and nomenclature – have served to uproot most of us from a specific geography as well as an internal location for the self. My work attempts to trace the socio-cultural patterns that have brought me comfort and stability, and also those factors that have led to conflict and which serve to undo existing attachments to the places we call home. 

About

Annie Zaidi, is the Nine Dots Fellow 2019-20 as the winner of the Nine Dots Prize 2019/2020.  Annie will be at CRASSH in Michaelmas Term 2019. 
Zaidi began her career as a reporter with stints at leading newspapers and magazines including Mid-Day and Frontline. She has published both fiction and non-fiction: Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales is a collection of essays shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2010, and Love Stories # 1 to 14 is a collection of short fiction published in 2012. In 2015, she published an anthology called Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women's WritingElle magazine named Zaidi as one of the emerging South Asian writers 'whose writing… will enrich South Asian literature'. She currently works as a freelance writer, working on fiction, scripts and columns for magazines and newspapers.

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