SOAS University of London will host the launch of Leila Aboulela: Writing as Refuge, a new biography of the Sudanese writer by scholar and editor Bhakti Shringarpure, on Tuesday, 10 November 2026. According to the SOAS event page, the launch runs from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm in the Senate Alumni Lecture Theatre at Senate House, London. Ida Hadjivayanis, Director of the SOAS Centre of African Studies, will chair. You can register for the event on Eventbrite.

The book is the first full-length biography of Aboulela, and the first in a forthcoming series of African writers’ biographies published by Routledge. It traces her childhood and youth in Khartoum, her difficult move to Scotland, and her unlikely path to becoming a writer. Shringarpure draws connections between Aboulela’s life and her fiction, looking at the experiences that shaped her work, both as subjects and as forces that helped her find her voice. The book combines interviews, literary criticism, and the key events of her life into a portrait of a Muslim woman writer from Sudan who belongs to many literary traditions at once: Sudanese, Scottish, Muslim women’s, African, and Black British writing. You can find more details on the Routledge page for the book.

Aboulela rose to prominence in the early 2000s with novels, short stories, and radio plays about Muslim women trying to claim autonomy in a Western world that casts them as outsiders. She was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, for her story “The Museum,” and her novels include The Translator, Minaret, Lyrics Alley, The Kindness of Enemies, and River Spirit. Her most recent honor is the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize.

Shringarpure is a writer, editor, and producer based in Paris. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and co-author of India’s Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives. She edited the anthologies Literary Sudans, Imagine Africa, Volume 3, Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings, and Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War, and she edits the Decolonize That! book series. She also co-founded Warscapes magazine, which has become the Radical Books Collective, and produced the feature film Nuur. She has presented her research on Aboulela’s life before, including a 2022 lecture at the University of Edinburgh and a 2024 fellows’ seminar at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.

If you are in London on 10 November, this looks like a good evening for anyone who has loved Aboulela’s novels.