Kamila Shamsie at HOME

The Complete Works is an event series extending over three years, curated and presented by the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing Senior Research Fellow Ellah Wakatama Allfrey in association with HOME. The in-depth interviews feature a line-up of some of the UK’s most exciting contemporary writers whose work embodies and has strong resonance with the theme chosen each year; currently it is the powerful ‘hope and resistance’.

So far, Ellah – editor-at-large at Canongate Books, founding Publishing Director of The Indigo Press, and a critic and broadcaster – has been in discussion with the Scottish Makar Jackie Kay and Another Day in the Death of America author and Guardian columnist Gary Younge. Future speakers include foreign correspondent Christina Lamb on 16 December, novelist and essayist Aminatta Forna on 20 January, and Channel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilum on 19 February – more here.

Kamila Shamsie is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and she is also a Patron of Manchester Literature Festival, which still has some ‘Bookend’ events worth looking into this autumn

The latest internationally renowned writer joining her is Professor Kamila Shamsie, whose most recent novel Home Fire was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and won the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. An updating of the classical ancient Greek tragedy Antigone to contemporary multicultural Britain, Ellah says that few novels sum up her hope and resistance theme more powerfully than Home Fire. In this conversation, Ellah will be finding out a little more about the inspiration that led to the publication of Home Fire along with how some of Kamila’s other novels fit the topic, including 2014’s A God In Every Stone, shortlisted for the Baileys Prize, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and Burnt Shadows (2009), which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Originally from Karachi, three of Kamila’s six novels have received awards from Pakistan’s Academy of Letters and she is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists and in 2017 Kamila joined the Centre for New Writing as it celebrated its tenth anniversary year. Kamila Shamsie is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and she is also a Patron of Manchester Literature Festival, which still has some ‘Bookend’ events worth looking into this autumn.