This event has been cancelled. We are sorry for inconvenience caused. If you had bought tickets for this event the box office will be in touch to see if you would like to transfer to a different event or have a refund.

Brave New Words is a collection of fifteen specially commissioned essays from distinguished authors exploring the value of critical thinking, the power of the written word, and the resonance of literature in the twenty-first century.

Each explores the crucial place of the writer, past and present. Their work articulates ‘brave new words’ at the heart of battles against limitations on fundamental rights of citizenship, the closure of national borders, fake news, and an increasing reluctance to engage with critical democratic debate.

Editor, literary activist, writer and presenter, Susheila Nasta will be joined by internationally acclaimed writer and academic Eva Hoffman to discuss the crucial place of the writer, past and present.

Brave New Words imagines writing across shifting and troubled borders, and diverse possibilities for living, working, and belonging together.

About the Authors

Susheila Nasta, MBE is Editor-in-Chief of Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing she founded in 1984. A literary activist, writer and presenter, she is Professor of Contemporary and Modern Literatures at Queen Mary, University of London and Professor Emeritus at the Open University. She has published widely on postcolonial and contemporary writing. She is co-editor of the first Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing.

Eva Hoffman’s Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in hiding in Ukraine. She was born in Poland two months after the war and, as a teenager, moved to the US. She was groomed as a concert pianist but instead chose to be a writer and academic, shedding light on the tangled roots of racial prejudice in Europe.

Eva Hoffman is the author of Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, Shtetl, and The Secret. Her essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, and other publications.

Please note: This event was originally advertised as featuring Olumide Popoola who is no longer able to attend. This event will now feature Eva Hoffman.