The International Library: Queer Migrations (In person and online)
We're delighted to be teaming up again with our colleagues across the globe, the American Library in Paris, the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco and The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn on The International Library, a series of conversations across time, place and language.
Hosting for the first time at The London Library, we welcome Gaar Adams and Sulaiman Addonia, two writers whose new works consider the complex intersections of queerness and migration.
Gaar Adams’s debut work of non-fiction, Guest Privileges, is a mix of memoir and reportage which explores what it means to be queer in the Gulf States and his own decade-long journey of dislocation. Asking why LGBTQ+ migrants might choose to live in a region where penalties for queer acts include torture and death, he riskily gathered interviews and stories from across the region. But as he began his own clandestine queer relationship, faultlines and deeper questions began to emerge, revealing his own disquieting assumptions about the motivations and identities of others.
Sulaiman Addonia’s third novel, The Seers, follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn, in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist sleeps, and against the backdrop of the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the UK asylum system, the novel considers intergenerational histories and colonial trauma alongside the psychological and sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as land and nations are.
In conversation with novelist Isabelle Dupuy, these extraordinary writers discuss migration, dislocation and queerness, what it takes to balance opportunity and risk, subversion and assimilation, how to build a life and a community and what constitutes home.
Sulaiman Addonia appears as part of Flip Through Flanders, presented by Flanders Literature.
Gaar Adams is the author of Guest Privileges: Queer Lives and Finding Home in the Middle East (Harvill Secker, 2024.) His reporting from the Middle East and South Asia has been featured in publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Rolling Stone, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, Slate and VICE. He was on the 2020-21 London Library Emerging Writers Programme and received his Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Glasgow. He currently teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Hull and lives in London.
Sulaiman Addonia FRSL is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist who came to London as an underage unaccompanied refugee. His other novels include The Consequences of Love and Silence is My Mother Tongue, which have been shortlisted for awards including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the African Literary Award from MoAD in San Francisco. His essays appear in Lit Hub, Granta, Freeman’s, The New York Times, De Standaard and Passa Porta. He lives in Brussels where he founded the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees & Asylum Seekers and the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival In Exile (AALFIE).
Isabelle Dupuy grew up in Haiti, studied and lived in the US and came to the UK to work on a City trading floor before becoming an author. Her first novel Living the Dream was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Awards 2021 and was the main title for Tesco's Black History Month campaign 2024. A regular contributor to the RLF's Writers Mosaic, her writing has also featured in the New York Times, the White Review, Litro, the Bookseller and other publications. She's currently working on her second novel, The Debt, about the historic debt between Haiti and France in the 19th century. She is a trustee of the London Library.
The International Library is a series launched in collaboration with the American Library in Paris, the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn and The London Library, which offers conversations across time, place, and language. The International Library celebrates the live diffusion of in-person conversations in the hope of connecting new audiences across land and sea for a collective, intercultural experience.
Guest Privileges by Gaar Adams, The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia and Living the Dream by Isabelle Dupuy will be available to buy at the event and online from our partner bookshop Hatchards.
NB This event will take place in person at The London Library and will be livestreamed. Doors (and the bar) open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start. The livestream will begin on YouTube from 7.30pm and will be available to watch live or at any time after the event, using the same link. If you purchase an online ticket, you will be sent a viewing link 24 hours before the event begins. If you do not receive a link, please check your junk mail or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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