Literature for Inclusion at the House of Literature in Trondheim is delighted to invite you to a Poetry without Borders webinar with Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Somali Italian poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, and oral performer.

Register in advance for this webinar.

On October 27th (18:00 CET), Ali Farah will read her poems in Italian and English and talk about borders, identity, literature, and migration.

The reading will be followed by a Q & A with Theresa Coe, Gulabuddin Sukhanwar (founder of Literature for Inclusion), and Stella Mililli (ITAT).

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali Italian poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, and oral performer. She has published three novels, Madre piccola (2007; Little Mother, IUP 2011) and Il comandante del fiume (2014; The Commander of the River, forthcoming IUP 2021), Le stazioni della luna (The Stations of the Moon, June 2021), and a bilingual (French and Italian) collection of short stories Un sambouk traverse la mer (MEET 2020). In 2018 her rewriting of Antigone was directed by Giuseppe Massa in Palermo. She developed a libretto on the basis of stories found in the Italian city of Matera for a performance directed by James Bonas with music composed by Nigel Osborne.

She holds a Ph.D. in African Studies (Università L’Orientale Napoli) and is the recipient of the Lingua Madre and Vittorini Prizes. She has participated in writing programs and held residencies across the world, incl. the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2017), MEET (Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs, 2018), Art Omi Residencies (2018), Civitella Ranieri Foundation (2019), La Marelle (2019) and STIAS (Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, First Semester 2020).
Currently she is working with Belgian artist and illustrator Goele Dewanckel on a Serigraphic book to be published in 2021 by Else Edizioni and on the Rwandan opera La fille de l’homme qui prévoyait pour le future, co-created by Dorcy Rugamba, James Bonas e Grégoire Point. She is a UNDP consultant for a project on Oral Historiography for Peace Building in Somalia.

This webinar is a collaboration between the Huse of Literature in Trondheim and ITAT – Italiani a Trondheim.

Poetry without Borders is part of the Literature for Inclusion initiative led by Gulabuddin Sukhanwar in collaboration with Hanna Musiol, Associate Professor of English at NTNU and NTNU’s research project TransLit: Sustainable Ethics, Affects, and Pedagogies led by Associate Professor of Literature in English, Libe García Zarranz.