Priya Basil

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Priya Basil (2019)

Priya Basil (born March 27, 1977 in London ) is a British author .

Life

Her parents moved to Kenya when she was one year old. She grew up in Nairobi . At sixteen she went to boarding school near London. When she was twenty her family moved back to the UK and she began studying English literature at the University of Bristol . She first worked in the advertising industry before deciding to move to Berlin in 2007 and become a full-time writer. In addition to their commitment to international arms control, she founded with journalist Matthias Fred Rich Auf der Horst in 2010 Authors for Peace ( Authors for Peace ), an authoring platform for writers to promote peace. Basil supports the Control Arms Campaign, a cooperation between Amnesty International , IANSA and Oxfam , which works for a global legal regulation and control of the arms trade.

The first event by Authors for Peace took place on September 21, 2010, the United Nations ' International Day of Peace , with the support of the Berlin International Literature Festival . Priya Basil hosted a 24 hour live online reading by 80 authors from around the world.

In 2013, BücherFrauen, a group of 800 women who work in the publishing industry in Germany, compiled a list of female candidates for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade . Priya Basil is one of the 22 recommended writers, along with Hannah Arendt , Arundhati Roy , Nawal El Saadawi , Herta Müller and Juli Zeh .

In September 2013, Basil signed Juli Zeh's open letter to Angela Merkel . In the letter, Merkel is criticized for her hesitant reaction to the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden and urged to act. Priya Basil read this letter publicly on the opening day of the Berlin International Literature Festival. Together with Juli Zeh, she organized the so-called march to the Chancellery on September 18, 2013, another action in which writers spoke out against spying on innocent citizens.

Priya Basil is one of the initiators of the appeal “Defend Democracy in the Digital Age”, a global campaign against spying and mass surveillance that was launched on December 10, 2013. She is one of the seven authors who wrote this appeal and who collected the first 560 signatures from prominent writers. The other initiators are Juli Zeh, Ilija Trojanow , Eva Menasse , Janne Teller , Isabel Cole and Josef Haslinger . The appeal was published in over 30 international newspapers, in Germany by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . The appeal was also published as a referendum on change.org.

In 2016 she and 100 women ( Katharina Grosse , Ines Kappert, Julia Eckert, Heike-Melba Fendel , Marion Detjen, Annika Reich , Sabine Hark and others) founded the action alliance We do that. For a post-migrant society . In this context, she initiated the nationwide series “Meeting Place Bookstore”, story-telling salons and readings with people who have fled to Germany.

Together with the writer Chika Unigwe, she completed the Tübingen poetics lectureship in 2014, and Taiye Selasi and Nii Ayikwei Parkes came to Tübingen as guests .

In 2017, Priya Basil and Ulrich Schreiber conceived and curated the International Congress for Freedom and Democracy, which took place from September 8 to 10, 2017 as part of the Berlin International Literature Festival.

Basil has written extensively about Europe and the future of the European Union. She is committed to an official European holiday in all member states. In 2017, she launched a European Holiday Campaign that included a "European Holiday" petition on change.org to set such a day. At the invitation of Sonja Longolius and Janika Gelinek , directors of the Literaturhaus Berlin , Basil is curating an event in 2018 that is intended as a political intervention.

The magazine Wired writes about Basil

"She is a British, Kenyan, Indian author living in Germany, one of those contemporary writers whose life does not fit between two book covers because it is simply too incredible."

- Wired magazine

Priya lives in London and Berlin .

plant

Her first novel Ishq and Mushq was published in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize . In this family panorama that spans three generations and loops between Africa, Europe and Asia, Basil links fates against the background of historical upheavals, including the division of British India and the funeral of Winston Churchill . With humor and elements of magical realism, Basil tells of identity development and exile.

Her second novel, The Obscure Logic of the Heart , was published in June 2010. It is a love story against the background of cultural, religious prejudices and international conflicts. Thomas Böhm ( Radio Eins , Die Literaturagenten) summarizes his reading impressions as follows:

“In 'The Logic of the Heart', Priya Basil explores two big themes: faith and love. And how it does this is just as timelessly beautiful as it is currently relevant. "

Basil regularly writes essays for Lettre International . Her subjects are art, Europe, democracy, migration and (neo-) colonialism.

Works

Awards

Web links

Commons : Priya Basil  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Authors for Peace. The idea.
  2. ↑ List of proposals for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2013, BücherFrauen, accessed on July 7, 2014
  3. ^ The Guardian: Peer Steinbrück accuses Angela Merkel of negligence over NSA revelations , Phillip Oltermann September 20, 2013
  4. ^ The March of the Authors , Die Zeit Online, September 18, 2013
  5. ↑ pbinfo.weebly.com: Writers Against Mass Surveillance - The Appeal , December 10, 2013
  6. ^ Writers dub UK leaders 'America's digital pit bull' over surveillance The Guardian, December 11, 2013
  7. ^ Democracy in the Digital Age - The Call of the Writers FAZ Online , December 10, 2013
  8. ↑ A STAND FOR DEMOCRACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE , December 10, 2013
  9. ↑ [1] , We do it - About us
  10. ↑ International Congress for Democracy and Freedom - international literature festival berlin. Retrieved May 2, 2018 .
  11. ↑ The delimitation of the impossible . In: Der Tagesspiegel Online . December 31, 2016, ISSN  1865-2263 ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed May 2, 2018]).
  12. ↑ Priya Basil: Essay Europe and the Fear of the Individual: We Are Brexit . In: The daily newspaper: taz . July 14, 2016, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed on May 2, 2018]).
  13. ↑ LI 117 | Lettre - Europe's cultural newspaper. Retrieved May 2, 2018 .
  14. ^ The Fight for Europe. State of Exception, reloaded - Literaturhaus Europa. Retrieved May 2, 2018 .
  15. ↑ European Union: Aid Package for Europe's Civil Society . In: ZEIT ONLINE . ( zeit.de [accessed on May 2, 2018]).
  16. ^ Priya Basil: Call for a European Public Holiday! (Speech in English and German). June 8, 2017, accessed May 2, 2018 .
  17. ^ Sign the petition. Retrieved May 2, 2018 (UK English).
  18. ^ Program Literaturhaus Berlin May 2018. Accessed on May 2, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Wired.com: Organizers of the Petition Against Mass Surveillance: Priya Basil, January 14, 2014
  20. ↑ All the blindness of the world | Lettre - Europe's cultural newspaper. Retrieved May 2, 2018 .
  21. ↑ Where are you from? | Lettre - Europe's cultural newspaper. Retrieved May 2, 2018 .
  22. ↑ Steel that bites the earth | Lettre - Europe's cultural newspaper. Retrieved May 2, 2018 .
  23. ↑ zeit.de: Excerpt
personal data
SURNAME Basil, Priya
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1977
PLACE OF BIRTH London