Cúirt is delighted to welcome Suad Aldarra and Derek Owusu in conversation with Sarah Clancy, discussing the meaning of home, the importance of belonging and the challenge of pushing borders and boundaries. Suad Aldarra’s debut memoir, I Don’t Want to Talk About Home, is the captivating story of how she was forced to flee war-torn Syria in 2012, as well as a moving reflection on the struggles of building a new life in Ireland.
In his latest novel, Losing the Plot, Derek Owusu, driven by a deep-seated desire to understand his mother’s life before he was born, offers a powerful imagining of her journey from Ghana to the UK, and how she navigated parenthood in a strange and often lonely environment, to interrogate how the effects of displacement are felt across generations. Told in a genre-bending, impressionistic style, Owusu explores the pain of migration and the importance of telling stories, to others and ourselves, in hopes to make sense of them.
Duration 1 hour
Suad Aldarra is a writer and scientist based in Dublin. She was born in Saudi Arabia to Syrian parents. After fleeing the war in 2012, she lived in Egypt and the US before settling in Ireland. In 2021, Suad was awarded the Arts Council English Language Literature Bursary Award. Her debut memoir, I Don’t Want to Talk About Home, was published by Penguin in 2022.
Derek Owusu is an award-winning writer and poet from North London. In 2019, he collated, edited and contributed to SAFE: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space. His first novel, That Reminds Me (Stormzy’s Merky Books, 2020) won the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction; his second novel, Losing The Plot, was published in 2022 by Canongate Books and has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2023.
Sarah Clancy is a poet, activist and community worker from Galway city although she now lives and works in County Clare. She has published three collections of poetry Stacey and the Mechanical Bull (Lapwing Belfast), Thanks for Nothing Hippies (Salmon Poetry) and The Truth and Other Stories (Salmon Poetry). Her poems have been published in Ireland the UK, USA, Canada, Mexico, Slovenia, Poland, Italy and Nicaragua and broadcast on RTE TV and Radio and BBC Radio. More recently her work was included in the groundbreaking anthology from The Lifeboat Press Queering the Green and in a film–poem collaboration between filmmaker Matthew Thompson, IMMA, Poetry Ireland and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation.
