Every time the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature comes around we browse the list of authors and sessions to see what piques the interest and to find some recommendations for readers. This time we’re looking for sessions with nonfiction authors, why we like them, and where you can see them. Also available: our top ten selection of non-fiction sessions.
Warrior Queens, Rebels & Courtesans – How Women Shaped the World: Kate Mosse & Manu S. Pillai
2 February 6.30–7.30pm @ InterContinental
Session No 95: AED 60
Says Kate Mosse: “Part a detective story into my own family history, part a celebration of nearly 1,000 trailblazing and brilliant women, Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries seeks to put women back into the history books: women of faith and conviction, engineers and explorers, lawyers and scientists, writers and campaigners, mothers of invention, those who lived by the pen and died by the sword.”
History may be written largely by the winners, but it’s also written mostly by men. Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries (subtitled ‘How Women (Also) Built the World’) brings together stories of unheard and under-heard women’s history, and of how and why women’s achievements have routinely been omitted from the history book. It’s both an alternative feminist history of the world and a personal memoir about the nature of women’s struggles to be heard, about how history is made and by whom.
This session has Kate Mosse – bestselling novelist, and also founder of the global campaign #WomanInHistory – talking with popular historian Manu S. Pillai, whose own books examine the drama and action of India’s past. They include The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History (2019), and most recently, False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma (2021).
It will be fun to see which women Mosse choose to highlight. Her book’s subjects range widely, from the 13th century Mongolian warrior princess Khutulan to American conservationist Rachel Carson; from Tibetan Buddhist nun and freedom fighter Ani Pachen to the Greek naval commander Laskarina Bouboulina; from freedom rider Pauli Murray to inventor of the dishwasher Josephine Cochran; from the world’s first named author Enheduanna, priestess of the moon god in the Sumerian city-state of Ur, to the pioneering 19th century female doctors known as the Edinburgh Seven.
Alexandra Shulman: Clothes … & Other Things that Matter
4 February 11-2pm @ InterContinental
Session No 260: AED 60
So do clothes really matter in the grand scheme of things? Alexandra Schulman has made a career out of believing that clothes do matter – she was the longest serving Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue and is one of the UK’s most frequently-quoted voices on fashion trends. She understands that lots of us find that we associate the big moments, and even the small ones, with whatever we were wearing at the time; so, as she puts it, “Clothes … and other things that matter is a book not only about clothes but about the way we live our lives. From childhood onwards, the way we dress is a result of our personal history. In a mix of memoir, fashion history and social observation I am writing about the person our clothes allows us to be and sometimes the person they turn us into”.
Here she’s written a memoir leavened with fashion history and a good deal of social commentary If she’s good on outsize sweaters are good for hiding in, red shoes are essential for showing off, even when the rest of your outfit is funereal, and holiday wardrobes are just plain fun even if you’ll never wear them again (though maybe living in Dubai is an exception). What she’s doing is looking at how a woman’s wardrobe fits into the broader picture – the career ladder, motherhood, romance, sexual identity, ambition, failure, body image and celebrity.
There’s insight in the book, and humour too – at times it’s refreshingly self-deprecating as well. Alexandra Shulman should be interesting company.
Shahd AlShammari: How Literature Saved My Life
4 February 1.30–2.30pm @ Mohammed Bin Rashid Library
Session No 240: AED 60
How would you react to the sudden onset of a debilitating illness that transforms your life forever? Diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at the age of 18, Shahd AlShammari learned never to give up; she continued her education, earning her MA in 2009 and a PhD in 2014, and currently holds academic positions at Kuwait’s Arab Open University and Gulf University for Science and Technology. She researches women’s rights, disability issues and, recently, illness narrative; she’s published a book of short stories and, last year, her account of learning to come to terms with her unpredictable condition, Head Above Water.
It’s a personal account that takes us through high points and low as she struggles to understand, accept and work with her condition. The book is also a reflection on illness and the stories of other women whose lives have been similarly affected – and not just by the illness itself but also by a society that rejects anything that feels ‘different’. It makes for a rich, lyrical, honest account that resonates with insight, from the writer not being ‘allowed’ to be ill to the feelings of failure and humiliation that can follow.
Shahd believes literature gives us the opportunity to question all our assumptions and our values; it opens the mind to other realities and new possibilities. Her talk will draw comparisons with characters from literature who have been judged because of their disability, or may have inspired others because of it.
Reza Aslan: An American Martyr in Persia
4 February 2.30–3.30pm @ InterContinental
Session No 59: Gold AED 75, Silver AED 60
Howard Baskerville arrived in Tabriz in 1907 to teach at the Memorial School of the American Presbyterian Mission. He was a Princeton graduate and basically a missionary; but he got swept up in the Persian Constitutional Revolution, which ran from 1905 to 1911 with the goal of ending royal corruption and ending dominance by foreign powers.
Tabriz was the last holdout of the country’s constitutionalists; an ardent supporter of the popular cause, Baskerville resigned his post and joined the revolutionaries. Missionaries were expected to steer clear of domestic politics, but Baskerville’s interactions with his Iranian students and friends led him to breach protocol in a manner that outraged the US State Department and endeared him to the locals. He even relinquished his U.S. passport rather than back down. In 1909 he was killed in action at the siege of Tabriz. He was just 25, and Reza Aslan’s new biography of Baskerville calls him a martyr.
Aslan is clearly impressed by his subject: “he had surrendered his citizenship, abandoned his mission, and cast off the expectations of his church. He was, like Jesus bursting forth from the tomb, a brand new being: born not of water and blood, but of fire and spirit”.
An Iranian-American academic and writer, Reza Aslan converted to evangelical Christianity when he was young but eventually reverted to Islam; that gives him a position of some authority from he has written extensively on both religions. An American Martyr in Persia is a racy tale that rattles along. But it’s also a plea for reconciliation between Iran and the UAE: “My hope is that [Baskerville’s] heroic life and death can serve in both countries as the model for a future relationship — one based not on mutual animosity but on mutual respect.”
Kerry Daynes:
A Forensic Psychologist at the Frontline of True Crime
4 February 4.45–5.45pm @ InterContinental
Session No 81: AED 60
Kerry Daynes is a forensic psychologist with 25 years of frontline experience in police investigations, especially of serial killers. She’s also the Sunday Times Best Selling author of The Dark Side of the Mind and a regular on TV true crime shows. She’s interesting, articulate, and highly qualified; she’s also an impressive speaker, so this session should be good.
It’s based on her second book, What Lies Buried: A Forensic Psychologist’s True Stories of Madness, the Bad and the Misunderstood – essentially nine case studies of some of her most perplexing clients. They demonstrate that there’s always more than meets the eye – and that there are usually two sides to every story: the bad stuff people do generally has an underlying cause, not an excuse but a reason.
Whether she is dealing with a young murderer who says he has heard voices telling him to kill, a teacher who daubs children in red paint, or an aspiring serial killer who faints at the sight of blood, Kerry’s quest is to delve beyond the classic question asked of her profession: “are they mad or are they bad?”
In most true crime accounts the focus is on the gory detail; Kerry Daynes by contrast brings compassion and empathy to her cases and her clients, no matter what they have done – and sometimes what they have done is pretty awful.
James Fox: Colours in Context – A Cultural History
4 February 7–8pm @ InterContinental
Session No 122: AED 60
Forget the science, forget rods and cones and cerebral perception; colour is primarily a cultural construct, says James Fox, “a pigment of our imaginations that we paint all over the world”. The Tiv people of West Africa get by with just three basic terms for colour: black, white and red. In the West, paint manufacturers now offer more than 40,000 dyes and pigments, so many, says Fox, that they have run out of sensible names for them – which means resorting to descriptors like ‘Churlish Green’ and ‘Dead Salmon’.
James Fox – an art historian (Director of Studies in History of Art at Emmanuel College, Cambridge) and a BAFTA-nominated broadcaster (notably for history of art documentaries) – has written a beguiling cultural history in The World According to Colour. As the subtitle ‘A Cultural History’ indicates, it’s all about context and the meanings that colours have acquired in different eras and different civilisations.
For instance, the chapter on ‘red’ (he gives each of seven colours a chapter of their own) begins with the discovery in 1994 of 30,000-year-old red handprints in the depths of the Chauvet Cave in southeast France and ends with an account of the work of the 20th-century Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, who made copious use of the blood of chickens and cows in her installations. Along the way Fox references haemoglobin, the ritualistic use of red ochre, human sacrifice in Meso-America, the production of cochineal, Chinese lacquerware, communism, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Red Shoes’, and much, much more.
As one reviewer put it, “the territory covered by The World According to Colour is nothing if not extensive”. And another: “this intelligent, vividly written book is full of black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green nuggets”. That bodes well for this talk.
Anil Seth: Being You – is it all just an illusion?
Investigating the new science of consciousness
5 February 10–11am @ InterContinental
Session No 86: AED 60
Imagine two people walking along Jumeirah beach. They both stop to gaze at the blue sea. Are they having the same experience? They both use the word ‘blue’, and the colour certainly seems to be a property of the sea rather than say of the mind. But the science of perception – of how the brain interprets sensory information to bring forth objects, people and places – suggests that our inner experiences differ just as our outer physical bodies do.
That’s the core of Anil Seth’s argument. He reckons that our ‘reality’ is actually a construct, an illusion, and understanding this involves tackling the thorny issue of consciousness: what it means to, well, be (and especially to be you).
Seth is a pioneering neuroscientist – Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex – whose book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness “deftly weaves the philosophical, biological and personal with a lucid clarity and coherence that is thrilling to read”. His area of expertise is understanding the biological basis of conscious experience; billions of neurons in each of our brains is working to create an individual conscious experience – but how does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person?
Being You has accumulated a lot of accolades; it’s a Top 10 Sunday Times Bestseller, Book of the Year for the New Statesman, Economist, and Bloomberg, Science Book of the Year for the Financial Times and Guardian. The latter described it as “a brilliant and profound book that explains how our perception of the world, ourselves included, is a ‘controlled hallucination’ … constructed as much from the inside out as the outside in”.
Through the Magnifying Glass – History in Detail(s):
Ambeth Ocampo, James Fox & Lucy Worsley
5 February 11.30–12.30pm @ Mohammed Bin Rashid Library
Session No 83: Gold AED 75, Silver AED 60
History is usually clumped together into lengthy time periods – decades, wars, centuries, reigns, civilisations, eras – but that, broad-brush approach often misses some of the key connections: the idiosyncrasies, micro-histories, quirks of human behaviour can inform our understanding of the past in more accessible ways. It’s the details that matter, after all.
This looks like a really interesting session, bringing together three experienced, articulate and media-friendly historians. Ambeth Ocampo is currently a professor at the Department of History in Ateneo de Manila University specialising in the art, culture and the people of the late 19th century Philippines; he has published over 35 books. James Fox, Director of Studies in History of Art at Emmanuel College Cambridge, and a BAFTA-nominated broadcaster, already figures in our must-see list (see above for his session on his new book The World According to Colour). Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator for the UK’s Historic Royal Palaces, presents history documentaries for the BBC and has written a number of bestselling books including If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home.
Marcus du Sautoy:
Thinking Better – The Art of the Shortcut in Math & Life
5 February 1–2pm @ InterContinental
Session No 142: Gold AED 75, Silver AED 60
Marcus du Sautoy is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science. He seems to have a genuine gift for communicating mathematical ideas, principles, tips and tricks to the general public, through several bestselling books and his regular appearances on TV and radio.
Thinking Better (published in 2021) is a typical example. It’s a celebration of the art of the shortcut – and an encouragement to all of us, in our lives and maybe particularly in our business lives, to realise that thinking better is often more successful than working faster. It’s full of clever ideas, explainers and tips about real-world applications of algebra, geometry, probability theory, and more. Michael Rosen’s review summarises it neatly: “Full of humour, stories and the lightest of touches, this is a sight-seeing tour of some of the world’s greatest neat dodges, unexpected turns and useful cut-throughs. Prepare to be caught short”.
So as well as covering some of the most effective mathematical shortcuts in history (from measuring the circumference of the earth in 240 BC to diagrams that illustrate how modern GPS works) the book also looks at how shortcuts in investing, learning a musical instrument, and improving your memory.
Prepare to be entertained, informed, and amazed …
William Dalrymple: The Company Quartet
5 February 5.30–6.30pm @ Mohammed Bin Rashid Library
Session No 135: Gold AED 75, Silver AED 60
We still talk about the British conquering India, but it wasn’t the British government that began seizing chunks of the subcontinent in the mid-eighteenth century; it was a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in a small office in the city of London.
Multi award-winning author and historian William Dalrymple comes to the festival to share the remarkable story behind The Company Quartet, his best-selling four-book history of the East India Company – The Anarchy, White Mughals, Return of a King and The Last Mughal. This is “rampaging, brilliant, passionate history” said the Wall Street Journal; the Sunday Times called it “gorgeous, spellbinding and important”, the Sunday Telegraph went for “vivid … unmatched … revolutionary”, and the Guardian stuck with “magnificent”, also pointing to the quality of the research involved: “Dalrymple has uncovered sources never used before”.
This is a meticulous description of the rise and fall of the world’s first global corporate power, across 200 years of the history of the Indian sub-continent and the British Empire. The Company Quartet is beautifully written and with a rare ability to impose narrative clarity on a complex story – thanks in no small part for William Dalrymple’s ability to find the telling detail and a range of historical voices to weave into this history. This is sure to be a hot ticket.
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