In this talk, award-winning author, journalist and university professor Kamal Al-Solaylee will touch on stories and research from his two nonfiction books, Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes and Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone). From the former, he will update us on the situation in his birth country of Yemen, now into its third year of a brutal and forgotten civil war. From Brown, he’ll explore the exploitation of brown migrants in the global economy as well as the increasing anti-Muslim, anti-refugee sentiments in western democracies since 9/11.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE is the author of the national bestselling memoir Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes which won the 2013 Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for Canada Reads and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. His latest book, Brown, was hailed as “brilliant” by The Walrus magazine and “essential reading” by the Globe and Mail. It was nominated for the Governor General Literary Awards in Nonfiction, the Trillium Book Award and won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. He was previously a theatre critic at the Globe and Mail and has written reviews and features on arts and politics for all major Canadian publications, including Toronto Star, National Post, The Walrus, Toronto Life, Chatelaine, Quill & Quire and Literary Review of Canada. He holds a PhD in English and is an associate professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Kamal Al-Solaylee’s visit to Vancouver was made possible by the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts.