At once subtle and shocking, powerful and probing Minoli Salgado’s beautifully-written account of an island-wide journey through her ancestral home of Sri Lanka unearths concealed political violence through the stories of twelve victim survivors of the country’s twenty-six year civil war.

Professor Minoli Salgado is the director of the Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she is Professor of International Writing. Her current research focuses on terror, testimony and exile and explores the way witness narratives service to mediate concepts of self and survival in three contexts of exceptional violence: the Cambodian genocide, the Sri Lankan civil war and the honour-based violence from diasporised sites.

This research was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2018 – 2020). Salgado’s publications include the critical monograph, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (Routledge, 2007); two books of fiction, A Little Dust on the Eyes (Peepal Tree, 2014) and Broken Jaw (87 Press, 2019) and a book of narrative non-fiction, Twelve Cries from Home: In Search of Sri Lanka’s Disappeared (Repeater Books, 2022).

Doors open and wine reception at 5pm. Event starts at 5.30pm.