The event Speak. Risk. Move. will focus on forms of resistance. We often imagine activism as something loud and visible — marches, speeches and grand acts of defiance. But stories are where power first takes hold: in what is remembered, and in what is erased. To write, then, is to resist forgetting — to contest history itself. In the event, Hannah Michell and host Senthuran Varatharajah invite us to a talk and reading on writing as a site of resistance, and how fiction can expose the struggles over memory and truth.
Hannah Michell was born in England and raised in Seoul. Her first novel, THE DEFECTIONS, was published in France and the UK in 2014 to wide acclaim. Her second novel, EXCAVATIONS (One World, 2023), was named one of the best crime novels of 2023 by LitHub and one of the top ten mysteries of 2023 by Publishers Weekly. She has taught at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the Dominican University of California.