Feryal Ali-Gauhar and H Y Attia chaired by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Two writers, Feryal Ali-Gauhar and H Y Attia, discuss their work across fiction, film and journalism and the particular challenges they face as women writers of Pakistani and Asian heritage.

Ali-Gauhar is an actor, film-maker, columnist, animal rights activist and acclaimed novelist. Her latest novel, An Abundance of Wild Roses, is set in the Black Mountains of Pakistan where the spirits of the mountains keep an eye on the doings of humans. It is a land of myth and tradition facing the march of progress and ongoing conflict. Can the villagers find a way to co-exist with nature that doesn’t destroy them both? Ali-Gauher’s first novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August, was a bestseller in India, and her second novel, No Space for Further Burials, won the Patras Bokhari award and was translated into several European languages.

Attia is a journalist and writer who used to work for Pakistani news magazine, Newsline, and has also worked in New York, Berlin and London. She grew up in Pakistan to immigrant parents of Indo-Burmese origins. She is now based in Liverpool where she is working on her first novel. She writes fiction under the pen name of H Y Attia. Her journalism has appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Spiegel Online, USA Today and Himal Southasian. Yousuf focuses on stories of people and cultures in a narrative non-fiction framework.

Discussions are chaired by journalist and commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, whose books include In Defence of Political Correctness, Refusing the Veil and Exotic England: The Making of a Curious Nation.