RSVP for this in-person event below. Please note spaces are limited, only book if you are sure to come.

Join us for the book launch of An Unlasting Home (Saqi Books, 2023), with author Mai Al-Nakib in conversation with writer Selma Dabbagh.

In 2013, Kuwait’s parliament authorised a law that made blasphemy a capital crime. Although this decision was successfully vetoed by the Emir of Kuwait, it highlighted the precarious sanctity of freedom of speech in a religiously conservative country. In An Unlasting Home, Mai Al-Nakib imagines an alternative reality where this law comes to pass.

There will be the possibility of getting your book signed.

Drinks and refreshments will be available.

Mai Al-Nakib is author of the novel An Unlasting Home and the short story collection The Hidden Light of Objects, winner of the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award in 2014. Her fiction has been published in Ninth Letter, The First Line, After the Pause, and The Markaz Review. Her essays have appeared in World Literature Today, BLARB: Blog of the LA Review of Books, and the BBC World Service, among others. She is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University.

Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction who lives in London. Selma’s first novel, Out of It, was published by Bloomsbury in 2011 and 2012 (pbk). Out of It was positively reviewed in the UK, the US and the Middle East. It was nominated as a Guardian Book of the Year in 2011 and 2012 by Ahdaf Soueif and Dame Marina Warner respectively. In 2021, Selma edited the collection, We Wrote In Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, for Saqi Books which included contemporary and classical short stories, poetry, novel excerpts and one 11th century letter on erotic themes.

This event is hosted as part of our bookshop programme, and co-presented with Saqi Books.

Images: Courtesy of Saqi Books.