Gallery: U.S. Embassy hosts writers in Eastleigh and Dadaab

The U.S. Embassy’s Somalia Unit hosted a reading and lecture tour, under the auspices of University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Tour participants conducted workshops with Somali youth in Nairobi and in the Dadaab refugee camps from June 9-18, 2009. Four distinguished writers – Christopher Merrill, Eliot Weinberger, Terese Svoboda, and Tom Sleigh – conducted a workshop in Eastleigh, then spent three days in Dadaab, where they visited all three camps and reached nearly 200 young people.

Happening Now

  • Just completed: “Sense of Belonging,” a bilingual Iowa City + Paris-based podcast series commissioned by Walid Rachedi and produced by NFW grad students in both cities, with support of the US Embassy in Paris.

  • Word has just reached us of the sudden death, in his hometown Gdańsk, of the novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright Paweł Huelle. RIP.

  • “I regret that poems can’t serve as witnesses in military tribunals; they can only testify in the court of history,” writes Iya Kiva in an essay for the project “War Is… Ukrainian Writers on Living Through Catastrophe.”


  • Congratulations to novelists Mansoura Ez-Eldin and Taleb Al-Refai for placing on the 2023 finalist list of the prestigious Prix de la littérature arabe.

     

  • Samuel Kolawole’s first novel, The Road to the Salt Sea, is announced for a July 2024 release.

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