Join us for an afternoon of readings by writers Aurelia Guo and Natasha Soobramanien.

Aurelia Guo will read a new text, “Aesop Condoms” (from Sketches on Everlasting Plastics (eds. Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Joanna Joseph), Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2023), and also from her book WORLD OF INTERIORS (Divided Publishing, 2022). Natasha Soobramanien will read from her collaborative novel DIEGO GARCIA (Semiotext(e) / Fitzcarraldo 2022), written with Luke Williams.

Schedule:

15:00-16:00 Readings by Natasha and Aurelia

Find the books here:
https://rile.space/books/diego-garcia
https://rile.space/books/world-of-interiors

About the books

“In World of Interiors I use collage and appropriation to destabilise the first-person ‘I’. I also write directly about the inescapable condition of being perceived and positioned by other people. Our lives take place in time and space, meaning in history and geography, as well as in relation to one another – not just interpersonally, but intergenerationally, with all the baggage of race, class, gender and nation that this implies. I write about economic cycles of wealth and poverty at the levels of the individual, group and state. The book is about travel and immigration: migrants, tourists and refugees. It is about the work of survival and the cost of survival. It is also a hopeful book – about how strong and indomitable the will can be.”

“An uncategorisable writer … intimate, impersonal, visionary and pitiless.” 
— Sam Riviere

“In reading Diego Garcia, we transcend the 'I' of the singular, towards the 'we' of the collective: of nation, homeland and of a people displaced. Through the intricately woven histories and the corresponding fictions within fictions, the compassion expressed in Diego Garcia highlights the absence of it in those who, forsaking their obligations towards other human beings, exiled the Chagossians from their home, and in doing so impressed upon themselves a kind of exile of the spirit, a penetrating sadness witnessed through the melancholy characters of this story and the society that looms as their backdrop. Written in a language at once distant and interior, dazzling, we see that until the Chagossian people are home, nobody is home.”
— Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood

About the authors

Aurelia Guo is a writer and researcher based in London, where she is Lecturer in Law at London South Bank University. She is the author of WORLD OF INTERIORS (Divided, 2022) and of the poetry chapbooks, NYT (Gauss PDF, 2018) and 2016 (After Hours Ltd, 2016).

Natasha Soobramanien lives in Brussels and works in The Netherlands, where she is an advisor at The Rijksakademie and a writing tutor on the Lens-Based Media and Experimental Publishing Masters programmes at the Piet Zwart Institute. Her collaborative novel with Luke Williams, DIEGO GARCIA, co-published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Semiotext(e), was awarded The Goldsmiths Prize in 2022.