feminist soapbox: a reading & conversation with Yara Rodrigues Fowler

this event is a provocation, a loose polemic, that probes into the necessity & place of politics in aesthetics. what forms rise to the occasion of narrating our ongoing post/colonial present? what kind of archives might we invoke & why? Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s novels, Stubborn Archivist & there are more things, give us inter-generational accounts of collectives and selves that are connected through webs of romance, education, coming of age, migration, politics, and culture. told in disconnected interludes and fragments that invoke poetry, prose, English, Portuguese, Brazil, & England, there are more things synthesizes new aesthetic relations between various forms & announces a world & politics that exceeds the nation state without losing site of the mundane ordinary pleasures of her characters. we invite you join us on 10 April 2024 to hear Yara read from her exciting new work, there are more things, & be in conversation.

This event has been made possible by generous support from the Department of English; the Department of Comparative Literature; the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities; the University Center for Human Values; and the Humanities Council.

Author Bio:

Yara Rodrigues Fowler grew up in South London.

Her first novel, Stubborn Archivist, was published in 2019. It was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2020 and the Desmond Elliott Prize 2019. Yara was named one of The Observer’s ‘hottest-tipped’ debut novelists of 2019 and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019.

Yara’s second novel, there are more things, was nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022 and Goldsmiths Prize 2022. As a work in progress, there are more things received the John C Laurence Award from the Society of Authors and was shortlisted for the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award 2019. It was one of the Sunday Times, BBC Culture and New Statesman’s books of the Year. It has been published in Germany, as ‘Zwischen Himmel und Erde’, translated by Maria Meinel.

Most recently, Yara was named one of Granta’s best young British writers, in their once-in-a-decade list. She is currently co-writing a play called The Conference of the Trees with Majid Adin and Connie Treves, based on the poems by members of the Change The Word poetry collective at Good Chance Theatre. The Conference of the Trees was selected for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s inaugural New Play Commission Scheme. Her next book, currently a work in progress, will be a literary account of the life of Princess Diana through a formally experimental, marxist, feminist, anti-imperialist lens.

Yara is also a part-time climate justice organiser.