The Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is bringing some of the world’s best / most interesting writers to Dubai 3-12 February. We’ve been going through the list to pick out some recommendations for you. This time: ten nonfiction authors, why we think they’re worth pursuing, and where you can see them.
With fiction, you generally feel that you know what (and who) you like, The Festival then becomes a way to put a personality to the printed voice, to hear something about the latest work from a favourite author, to clear up a detail that’s been puzzling you in the last novel, or to have your opinions and preferences reinforced by an in-person encounter (even if’s in the company of several dozen other people too).
But discovery is one of the pleasures of any literary festival – coming across authors and ideas that you didn’t know , or unexpectedly encountering someone with something to say that resonates, entertains, stimulates …
And while you can of course discover novels and novelists you didn’t know, there’s a special frisson of rummaging around in the non-fiction space. Here are ten writers at LitFest that might fit the bill for you.
Ella Al-Shamahi has degrees in Genetics and Taxonomy/Biodiversity and is taking her PhD in Palaeoanthropology (she “specialises in extinct human beings”, as she put it at a TEDx event).
But she is also a National Geographic sponsored explorer who works only in unstable, disputed or hostile territories – places with local wars, landmines, Government-enforced exclusion zones, and so on. She’s in demand as a speaker, and her excellent 2019 TED talk on doing frontline exploratory science in dangerous places has had more than 2.3 million views. On top of that she’s presented and/or produced several science series for BBC TV, Channel 4 and National Geographic. And she’s also a stand-up comic, performing internationally (including four Edinburgh Fringe shows).
So it’s no surprise that her latest book The Handshake: A Gripping History (published in March 2021) has been called “a fabulously sparky, wide-ranging and horizon-broadening little study … joyously unboring” (Sunday Times) and “cheerful, witty and well-researched” (The Spectator). We’d agree with all of that …
Ella Al-Shamahi has a solo session on The Handshake (session 163, 4pm on 4 February, AED 65) which promises to reveal how this most friendly of gestures has played a role in everything from meetings with uncontacted tribes to political assassinations – and what it tells us about the enduring power of human contact. She’s also on the panel with Fadel AlMheiri and Raphael Cormack for Uncharted Stories (session 8, 10am on 5 February, AED 65) considering the kind of stories that get missed by history.
Jenny Lawson, 48, is an award-winning humorist known for her great candour in sharing her struggle with mental illness. She’s the irreverent voice behind the popular blog TheBloggess.com (tagline, “Like Mother Theresa, Only Better”) and author of three New York Times best-sellers, two collections of essays and an adult colouring book. She says “I’ve been blogging about my strange little life for over a decade. It’s mainly dark humor mixed with brutally honest periods of mental illness” and that summarises the meat of her books too. She writes about her struggles with anxiety, depression, avoidant personality disorder and mild OCD (and the related battles with her insurance company)
Her laugh-in-spite-of-it-all autobiography, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, was a bestseller in 2012. That was followed a couple of years later by Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things (“less a manual on how-to-survive-mental-illness and more of a compendium on how-to-thrive-in-spite-of-your-brain-being-a-real-bastard”) and the adult colouring book/advice book she wrote and illustrated, YOU ARE HERE: An Owner’s Manual For Dangerous Minds (2017).
Her most recent book is Broken (in the Best Possible Way), a collection of essays “about not just dealing with, but celebrating the strange and broken parts of ourselves”. It takes the reader through her thoughts, feelings, questions, and struggles with a blend of wit, honesty, humanity and laugh-out-loud stories of buying condoms for her dog, business ideas that she wants to pitch to Shark Tank, and why she can never go back to the post office. It’s a pleasure to make her acquaintance.
At LitFest Jenny Lawson has a solo session on Broken (session 71, 2pm on 12 February, AED 65) and she’s on the panel with Ben Bailey Smith and Naji Bakhti for The Joke’s On Us, which looks at mining the personal for public laughs (session 4pm on 13 February, AED 65).
If you want a quick intro to modern art, Jessica Cerasi should be one of your go-to options. She has been Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the UK Government Art Collection, Assistant Curator of the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 2016 Biennale of Sydney, and Curatorial Assistant at London’s Hayward Gallery. Currently she’s Assistant Curator for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project, which may or may not be happening sometime soon.
She has also taught a popular five-week course on Demystifying Contemporary Art at Tate Modern in 2018 and 2019, and is the co-author of Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art (published 2017 – concise and pointed insights and explanation organised as an easy-to-navigate A to Z guide).
Her most recent book is Contemporary Art Decoded: Learn How to Understand and Interpret Contemporary Art, published last year. It takes ten key questions about contemporary art – what is contemporary art anyway? How can we understand what a work of art means? Can just about anything be called art these days? and so on – and uses them to talk about what you’re looking at, how it works, and why it matters. It’s a magpie favourite and highly recommended.
Jessica Cerasi is taking part in what looks like one of the strongest LitFest panel sessions, where’s she’s joined by Myrna Ayad and Lucinda Hawksley for You’ve Been Framed – Art That Endures (session 79, 2pm on 5 February, AED 65). The following day she’s talking about her own books: Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art? (session 36, 2pm on 6 February, AED 65)
Lucinda Hawksley (she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, but doesn’t seem to use the middle name ‘Dickens’ despite the best endeavours of the LitFest copywriters) is an author, broadcaster, lecturer, consultant and sometime curator. She has written, or co-authored, more than 20 books, biographies, social histories, art history and travel writing.
She’s extraordinarily productive and a captivating writer who finds really interesting subjects – like the biographies of Kate Perugini (Dickens’ daughter, and a far better artist than many of her male contemporaries who got all the attention then and now) and Lizzie Siddal (artist, poet, and artists’ model/muse – Hawksley calls her “a Pre-Raphaelite supermodel”); Bitten by Witch Fever, the story of the manufacture, uses and effects of arsenic in the 19th-century home, especially for pigments in wallpapers); and the recent Moustaches, Whiskers and Beards, a history of facial hair.
Victoriana and especially the life and times of Charles Dickens, his family and his friends provide the context for most of her work. But she’s also a trained art historian, and has several ‘introduction to art’ books to her name. The one she co-wrote with artist Andy Pankhurst, What Makes Great Art, is particularly recommended; it’s a pocket-sized reference that analyses 80 outstanding works of art to reveal what makes them special.
Lucinda Hawksley is a panellist with Daniel Newman and Karim Hauser for East Meets West (session 21, 6pm on 4 February, AED 65) on the flows of ideas, goods, wealth and culture between Europe and Asia. The following day she joins Jessica Cerasi and Myrna Ayad for You’ve Been Framed – Art That Endures (session 79, 2pm on 5 February, AED 65). This is a high-powered panel that will have much to say … And finally Ms Hawksley presides over Miss Havisham’s Wedding (session 47, 7.15pm on 7 February – Charles Dickens’ birthday! – AED 295), a three-course dinner with readings, anecdotes and insights into the women of Charles Dickens’ life and work. That’s going to be a hot ticket …
Marina Wheeler is a London-based barrister specialising in constitutional and human rights law; she also teaches mediation and conflict resolution, writes regularly for the UK Human Rights Blog, and is a regular commentator on legal matters for the UK’s national newspapers. (In May 2020 she also divorced her husband of 27 years, one Boris Johnson, following numerous stories of his infidelity.)
She was born in Berlin, the daughter of Dip Singh, a Punjabi who met and married noted journalist and broadcaster Charles Wheeler while he was the BBC’s India correspondent.
Her mother’s story forms the heart of Marina Wheeler’s book, The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab (published 2020). Kuldip Singh, known as Dip, a Sikh from the Punjab, had to flee to India with her family in 1947; the title refers to Dip’s palatial childhood home in Lahore, then in British India, now in Pakistan. The book interweaves her story with the larger narrative of partition as it shaped India, Pakistan and the wider post-imperial world Marina Wheeler has described the deeply personal account of a turbulent family history as “the story of a woman emerging from the shadows and taking control of her life”.
Marina Wheeler will be reading from and discussing The Lost Homestead (session 10, 2pm on 5 February, AED 65). She’s also joining Annabel Kantaria, Ben Miller and Mira Sethi for Strongly Worded Letters (session 44, 8pm on 5 February, AED 65 – “hear masters of their craft address a writer or person in their life that left a lasting impression on them”).
Dr Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist who writes regularly on ethical, literary, and scientific topics for the national and scientific press in the UK and theStates. A passionate campaigner for racial and gender equality, she’s a consultant and speaker much in demand for talks and workshops on bias, anti-racism, social inclusion, power and privilege. She has a couple of mini podcast series, too – Outside the boxes, examining how the labels and stereotypes affect us as a society, the science behind it, and what we can do about it; and Wish We Knew What To Say, about race and raising children with secure identities.
She’s also a writer, of course, which is why she’s at LitFest. As well as numerous research papers, she is the author of several influential (and very well written) books – notably (M)otherhood, a hybrid memoir and scientific analysis of women’s fertility and the political bias in perceptions of being a woman and a mother; Wish We Knew What to Say: Talking with Children about Race, a practical manual for parents, carers and educators; and most recently Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias.
At LitFest Pragya Agarwal has a solo session on Sway (session 91, 5pm on 12 February, AED 65) which looks unmissable; and she’s also taking part in a panel on Motherhood – The Joy, Struggle & Taboos with Hala Kazim and Iman Mersal (session 85, 12pm on 12 February, AED 65).
Rowan Hooper is joint Head of Features at New Scientist magazine in London, and host of the award-winning New Scientist Weekly podcast (highly recommended). He has a PhD in evolutionary biology and worked as a biologist for some years before joining the Japan Times in Tokyo as science editor. He’s been with New Scientist since 2005 and has been widely published elsewhere – including the Guardian, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Wired and The Economist.
He is the author of Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Mental and Physical Ability (2018), an inspirational tour of the peaks of human achievement. His most recent is the timely How To Spend A Trillion Dollars, which considers how a trillion dollars might be spent for the good of the planet.
It’s not that much: a trillion bucks is just one percent of world GDP, about the valuation of Google, Microsoft or Amazon, less than the 2008 bank bailout cost, less than has already been spent to deal with Covid-19. Rowan Hooper looks at the problems facing the world today and offers solutions that are realistic and workable. Spoiler alert – a trillion could cure all disease, refreeze the Arctic, reverse climate change, transition the world to clean energy, or enable us to explore the solar system: but which of those would offer the best return on investment for humanity? Fascinating stuff.
Rowan Hooper’s How to Spend a Trillion Dollars is session 92, 12pm on 12 February , AED 65.
Salma Serry graduated from the American University of Cairo with a MA in Filmmaking and Production; she writes and directs short narrative films (including Aida Wants A Gelati, Saraab, and Dinner 7665, all of which have been screened at several film festivals).
Her other speciality is the social history of cooking, menus and cookbooks; she is currently pursuing graduate studies in Gastronomy at Boston University, researching food and foodways from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) “at the intersection of history and culture”. She also runs @Sufra_Kitchen, a social platform on the history and culture of SWANA food; and she has a collection of over 400 historical cookbooks and related ephemera.
The cookbook has generally been overlooked as a legitimate research resource, despite the rich ecosystem in which cookbooks exist – stories of human movement and trade, relationship to nature, the effect of technology and science, the role of religion and politics, class and race, and everyday life. Her two LitFest sessions should be fascinating.
Salma Serry’s two-hour workshop Beyond Recipes: Re-approaching the Cookbook Genre for Historical Research (session 848, 11am on 6 February, AED 250) aims to provide practical on the application of research methods. She’s also joining Daniel Newman on the Jameel’s Roof Terrace for The Sultan’s Feast (session 46, 5pm 6 February, AED 65); Prof Newman is the translator of the book of the same name, composed in the fifteenth century by the Egyptian scholar Ibn Mubārak Shāh and featuring more than 330 recipes plus culinary tips and advice.
“My eyesight is not so good,” said Patrizia Reggiani when asked why she hired a hitman to take out her erstwhile husnabd and Gucci heir Maurizio Gucci . “I didn’t want to miss.” Small wonder Sara Gay Forden’s history of the fashion brand, House of Gucci, has proved a big hit in the Ridley Scott film adaptation – the book covers the story of Gucci from its roots in the early 1900s through the loss of the company by Maurizio Gucci and the fashion house’s spectacular turnaround under Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole and its continued success today. It’s the murder that provides the meat of the film, of course, but Sarah Gay Forden knows what she’s talking about; she covered the Italian fashion industry from Milan for more than 15 years, and she had the inside track.
House of Gucci was published back in 2001 (and has been updated since), winning rave reviews and making The New York Times extended best seller list. These days Sara Gay Forden now has another massive beat to covert; she’s based in Washington DC with Bloomberg News, leading a team that covers the Silicon Valley tech giants and their attempts to influence lawmaking in the nation’s capital.
At LitFest Sara Gay Forden has two solo sessions – How to Make the Internet Less Evil (session 135, 6pm 11 February, AED 65) is sure to be an articulate, thoughtful overview. And The House of Gucci: Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed (session 72, 3pm 12 February, AED 65) is bound to sell out, so get in quick …
Serhii Plokhy is Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. A leading authority on Eastern Europe, he has written a series of award winning books – among them The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2015) which argues that we can only understand the confluence of Russian imperialism and nationalism today by delving into the previous 500 years of the country’s history to see how its leaders have always exploited identity and territorial expansion to achieve imperial supremacy.
He has also focussed on nuclear accidents, with Chernobyl – History of a Tragedy (“heartbreaking stories of heroism” set against a backdrop of “political cynicism and scientific ignorance”) and Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima, the story of six nuclear disasters that shook the world. Based on wide-ranging research and witness testimony, Plokhy related the confused decision-making on the ground and the panicked responses of governments. His conclusion: the drive for energy has always trumped safety and the cost for future generations.
His most recent book is Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, published in April 2021. The Independent review called it “an enthralling account of a pivotal moment in modern history … replete with startling revelations about the deception and mutual suspicion that brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of Armageddon in October 1962”.
Serhii Plokhy joins Ahmed El Ghandour and Sarah bint Yousef Al Amiri for Inventions that Changed the World (session 62, 8pm on 12 February, AED 65) and then has his own session on Nuclear Folly (session 68, 12pm on 13 February, AED 65).
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