Please note that part of this event is in French. English language subtitles are available by clicking the closed captioning button.
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The Reading Agency and Libraries Connected East of England present ‘The Big Jubilee Read: Women’s Words’, the fourth in a series of six broadcasts celebrating great reads from across the Commonwealth.
Celebrating some of the wonderful female authors represented on the booklist Leena Norms will be speaking with authors Tahmima Anam, Yangsze Choo, Scholastique Mukasonga and the translator of her book, Melanie Mauthner, as they discuss their work, what it means to be a woman in literature, as well as their favourite picks from the booklist.
This event is in partnership with Libraries Connected East of England, library services representing the east of England which has a rich heritage of literature and writing
Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and was winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. Her follow up, The Good Muslim, was shortlisted for the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her latest novel The Startup Wife has just been published in paperback. Tahmima has been published in the Guardian, the Financial Times, and Freeman's, and is a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times. In 2013, she was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she now lives in London.
Yangsze Choo is the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghost Bride (now a Netflix Original series) and The Night Tiger, Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine's Book Club Pick, Amazon's Spotlight Pick for Best Book of the Month, with starred Kirkus, Booklist, and Publisher's Weekly reviews. Yangsze loves to eat and read, and often does both at the same time.
Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that thirty-seven of her family members had been massacred. Our Lady of the Nile, her debut novel, won the Ahamadou Kourouma Prize, the Prix Renaudot and the 2014 French Voices Award, and was shortlisted for the 2016 International DUBLIN Literary Award. It was adapted into an award-winning film in 2019. In 2017, her memoir Cockroaches was a finalist for the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. In 2019, her memoir The Barefoot Woman was a finalist for a National Book Award. In addition, she has won many prizes in France and elsewhere in Europe. She was recognized with the Distinction of Knight of Arts and Letters, according to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, by the ambassador of France in 2013. Most recently she was awarded the prestigious Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom for 2021.
Melanie Mauthner’s translation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile won the French Voices Grand Prize 2013 and her translations of Mukasonga's stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The White Review.
The Big Jubilee Read is a reading for pleasure campaign celebrating great reads from across the Commonwealth to coincide with Her Majesty The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee delivered in partnership with BBC Arts and The Reading Agency. It received additional funding from Arts Council England and is supported by Libraries Connected and the Booksellers Association.
Catch up on the series so far: [ Ссылка ]
Find out more about the Big Jubilee Read at [ Ссылка ] and download reading group resources for each of the 70 titles at [ Ссылка ]
