Home 5 Articles and Reports 5 Award for Festival Director who Challenges Stereotypes

Award for Festival Director who Challenges Stereotypes

by | Oct 3, 2018 | Articles and Reports, News

Syima Aslam, the Director of the Bradford Festival of Literature, has won the Hospital Club ‘h 100’ award in the publishing and writing category.  The Hospital Club is a private members club in London’s Covent Garden, with many media and publishing members.  The h 100 awards are given to “the most influential and innovative individuals across the breadth of the UK’s creative industries’.  They were founded in 2009 and run by the Hospital Club, which is so called because the building formerly housed a hospital in the 18th century.

The Bradford Festival of Literature started in 2014 and this year’s event included Jeanette Winterson, Elif Shafak, Ben Okri and the historian David Starkey.

Aslam is a British Muslim who co-founded the festival with Irna Qureshi who writes on British Asian culture.  Ever since the Bradford book burnings in 1989 after publication of The Satanic Verses, Aslam has sought to challenge stereotypical views, both of Muslims and her home city.  She wrote in the magazine Critical Muslim: “What the Bradford Muslim community failed to recognise at the time was that the impact of the image of a burning book, unprecedented in Britain and evoking as it did uncomfortable memories of the Nazi bonfires of 1933, symbolic of the repression of freedom of expression, as well as a death sentence on a writer, would cast a long shadow into the future. It would seal Bradford’s reputation as being full of backward, violent, religious fanatics.”

She notes that in 2013 when the 133-year-old Bradford Reform Synagogue, a Grade II listed building and the oldest Synagogue in the north of England, was faced with closure it was rescued by donations from the Muslim community.

“The Bradford Literature Festival, of which we are the founders and directors, has deliberately sought to wrest back control of the city’s identity by highlighting these bonds of faith,” she said.  “That is why we programmed a Jewish strand as part of its Bradford Heritage events. It is also why we decided to hold the festival’s very first Sacred Poetry occasion, in September 2014, at the city’s last remaining synagogue. The Sacred Poetry event offered an uplifting celebration of divine music and verse from across the religious spectrum.”

Recent News

15Jul
Al Faya: Where History Took Its First Steps on the Sands of the Desert

Al Faya: Where History Took Its First Steps on the Sands of the Desert

In a timeless moment etched into the memory of human heritage, the sun of Sharjah rose once again on the map of the world, this time through the gateway of deep history. At its recently concluded 47th session in Paris, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee officially inscribed the “Cultural Landscape of Prehistoric Faya” on the […]

15Jul
Tatsunoko Enters Publishing with TEEM BOOK

Tatsunoko Enters Publishing with TEEM BOOK

Tatsunoko Production, the legendary Japanese animation studio, has officially launched a new publishing imprint called TEEM BOOK, built on the pillars of universality, contemporaneity, and originality.   Founded in 1962, Tatsunoko is known worldwide for its iconic anime series such as Mach GoGoGo (Speed Racer), Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, and the Time Bokan series. With […]

15Jul
Leila Aboulela awarded PEN Pinter prize for her work on migration

Leila Aboulela awarded PEN Pinter prize for her work on migration

Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women. The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define […]

Related Posts

Tatsunoko Enters Publishing with TEEM BOOK

Tatsunoko Enters Publishing with TEEM BOOK

Tatsunoko Production, the legendary Japanese animation studio, has officially launched a new publishing imprint called TEEM BOOK, built on the pillars of universality, contemporaneity, and originality.   Founded in 1962, Tatsunoko is known worldwide for its iconic...

Leila Aboulela awarded PEN Pinter prize for her work on migration

Leila Aboulela awarded PEN Pinter prize for her work on migration

Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women. The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and...

Buenos Aires Publishers’ Fair in Focus

Buenos Aires Publishers’ Fair in Focus

Buenos Aires is gearing up to host the 2025 edition of the Publishers’ Fair (FED), bringing together over 330 publishing houses from Latin America and Spain. Set to run from August 7 to 10 at the C Complejo Art Media center.   Since its launch in 2013, the fair has...

Previous Next
Close
Test Caption
Test Description goes like this