Award-winning Pakistani publisher, novelist, poet and lawyer, Safinah Danish Elahi, will be participating in Ananke’s fourth edition of Women in Literature Festival beginning on April 23rd, 2024.
Safinah has earned her MFA in Publishing and Contemporary Fiction from Emerson College, Boston. Her poetry collection ‘The Unbridled Romance of Romance of Love and Pain’ was labeled epiphanic by the Pakistan’s leading newspaper Dawn. Her debut novel, Eye on the Prize, published in 2020, translated into Urdu has been converted into a TV series. She is also the founder of an award winning publishing house, Reverie Publishers. She is a scholar at the International Writer’s Program with the University of Iowa Fall Residency 2022. The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon, her second novel, has been longlisted for the Asian Fiction Prize 2023.
Safinah will be joined by writers who feature in Beyond, an anthology, a selection of stories from the Salam Award, published by Reverie Publishers.
The Reverie Panel at AnankeWLF will delve into the selection of short stories from the Salam Award. The Salam award has been running for imaginative fiction, with writers coming from different areas of life as well as sections of society, and the stories selected fall under the fantasy/horror/speculative fiction genre.
“It is our (Reverie Publishers) pleasure to provide a platform for these out of the box stories. Imaginative fiction essentially creates an alternate or an other-world, it pushes boundaries and is innovative in nature. We can only solve problems by thinking unconventionally. We hope readers enjoy reading about these uncustomary landscapes that the Salam Award has hand picked for us. In book form, it is more accessible and we are elated to be able to highlight their remarkable writing,” commented Safinah.
Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival 2024 aims to mobilize change by initiating conversations and dialogue across language, politics and socio-cultural boundaries. Over the past decade, humanity has seen the world grapple with increasing division, de-sensitization, and lack of compassion. Traditional and new media has played a pivotal role in amplifying such polarization through its use of propaganda, warped and divisive optics, and manipulative messaging.
At Ananke and by extension the Women in Literature Festival, the vision is to create a space for imagination, creativity and dialogue as fundamental values upon which just, and equitable societies are built and sustained. Artists, poets, writers, painters, filmmakers, journalists, photographers, musicians, and audiences– all have a role to play as catalysts of change.
More exciting announcements coming soon.
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