Ananke will welcome eminent literary personality Niaz Zaman in its fourth edition of the Women in Literature Festival 2024 on April 23rd. With the theme, Language and Erasure, the digita festival aspires to create a safe, inclusive space for dialogue in order to break the chains of division and polarization.
The three day, remote event will be live-streamed on Ananke’s Facebook page (@anankemag), showcasing a distinguished roster of guest speakers including Niaz.
Niaz Zaman, who calls herself “an accidental feminist,” is an academic, writer and translator from Bangladesh. With a male name – both before and after marriage – she passed off as a male writer in both academic and creative writing. Over the years, she has grown more aware of the continuing discriminations against women and, in her creative writing, shown not only their struggles but their achievements. She has often said, “If you are confronted by a wall and cannot bring it down, climb over it.” Like Virginia Woolf, she believes that writing can be androgynous. Hence, while much of her fiction focuses on women, she can empathize with disadvantaged others. Zaman’s forte is the short story, of which she has a number of collections. Her stories have been published in Kitaab and Suspect. She also has three novels: The Crooked Neem Tree, The Baromashi Tapes, and A Different Sita. She was part of the group which translated Kazi Nazrul Islam’s novel Bandhon Hara as Unfettered. She also translated his novel Mrityukshudha as Love and Death in Krishnanagar and co-translated his Kuhelika as The Revolutionary. For her contribution to translation, she received the Bangla Academy Award for Translation in 2016. She lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Talking about her participation at AnankeWLF2024, Niaz said: “I look forward to participating in Ananke Women in Literature Festival – 2024, to listening to the voices of women from different backgrounds and with diverse experiences, and in sharing my experiences in our common pursuit of freedom of thought and expression.”
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.
More exciting announcements coming soon.
Email us at media@anankemag.com for sponsorship opportunities.
