‘Writing Back’ with Laura Fish
Dr Elizabeth Jane Fish joins CLIC for the WeKONEKT-week in March 2023, a week dedicated to reconnecting the university campus with the vibrant city centre.
Dr. Fish will give a reading of her latest novel Lying Perfectly Still (extracted in Johannesburg Review of Books 2017, which is set is Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). The novel won the S I Leeds Readers’ Choice 2022 and took third place in the S I Leeds Judges’ Award. The reading will take place in the African-Brussels bookshop 'Pépite Blues' on Thursday 30/03 (18:30-21:00) and will be followed up by an interview with the author. In the interview, special attention will be paid to representations of authorial agency in her novels and the experimental nature of her works. An additional interview will be published in the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings, as part of a PhD-research project that focusses on the use of self-reflexivity in recent metafiction authored by Black British women. If you wish to attend the reading, register here.
Additionally, Dr. Fish will join Prof. Elisabeth Bekers in her course ‘Contemporary Literature in English’. In this course, the students will discuss Fish’s second novel Strange Music (2008), which offers a fictional exploration of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s family from a Creole and black slave woman's perspective. Afterwards, the students get a chance to ask Dr. Fish all of their questions about the work in a Q&A session.
On Friday 31/03, students and staff of VUB are invited to take part in a creative writing workshop that focusses on decolonization (14:00-17:00). With Dr. Fish’s sound guidance, novice writers will explore the concept of ‘writing back’ to the colonial centre and the different literary forms it can take. Previous experience of creative writing is not required, but places are limited. Therefore, we ask you to register and write a brief statement of motivation. To attend the workshop, register here.
Bio
Dr Elizabeth Jane Fish (also known as Laura Betton-Rodber) is a writer of Caribbean parentage. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing (Northumbria University). She has held posts as a Creative Writing tutor at St Andrews University, the University of Western Cape and the University of East Anglia, where she studied for the MA and PhD in Creative Writing. She has over 10 years’ experience with the BBC in broadcast television and radio and has been invited to read from and talk about her work internationally. She is also a Fellow of the Iowa International Writers’ Programme.
Her research interests include dialogues between writers across different cultures and geographies, narratives of cultural difference, black literature and literary criticism, the politics of marginalisation, the writers’ ethical responsibilities, issues of gender, the constructs of difference and otherness, and retrieving and rewriting hidden stories and histories. Literature and writing are central to her life and work.
Her first novel, Flight of Black Swans (Duckworth, 1995) is set in Aboriginal Australia and received very favourable reviews. Her second novel, Strange Music, (London: Jonathan Cape 2008; Vintage 2009) was Orange Prize Listed 2009; Nominated for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2009; and selected for Pearson Edexcel's Black British Writing A level reading guide 2017/18. Her latest novel, Lying Perfectly Still, is set is Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and won the S I Leeds Readers’ Choice 2022 and took third place in the S I Leeds Judges’ Award.
https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/laura-fish
https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-staff/f/laura-fish/
