Translating conflict and refuge: language, displacement, and the politics of representation
West Hub (University of Cambridge)
Friday 24 April 2026
9:00am – 6:00pm with Tamanna’s session at 17:00
This session, delivered by Paranda writer and translator Tamanna Easar, will offer a critical exploration of how Untold Narratives responded to a specific editorial need by developing a writer-editor-translator model for its Paranda writers’ group. The speaker will examine how this collaboration works in a way that keeps translation at the heart of the writer development process, enabling stories to circulate globally without flattening complex realities into stereotypical representations. What are the challenges, benefits and risks? How does literary collaboration function as a form of resistance to narrative simplification? And how might this model be replicable and scalable to other contexts?
This conference is convened by Tugba Basaran (Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement/Cambridge Refugee Hub, University of Cambridge), Ángeles Carreres (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge), María Noriega-Sánchez (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge), Marissa Quie (Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement/Afghanistan Desk, University of Cambridge).
Highlights of Tamanna’s session can be accessed here.
