Suna Afshan - DESIblitz Literature Festival
Suna Afshan is a writer and editor from Birmingham.
Her work has appeared in The TLS, Modern Poetry in Translation, Wasafiri, and Wild Court, among others.
She is Editor and Director of Pallina Press, Co-founder and Editor at Large at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, and sits on the Editorial Board of Broken Sleep Books.
Tape Letters
Tape Letters is a social history project shining light on the practice of recording and sending messages on cassette tape as a mode of communication.
Its current focus is on Pakistanis who migrated and settled in the UK between 1960-1980, and their Britain-born relatives. Drawing from first-hand interviews with over ninety participants, and the informal and intimate conversations found on the cassettes themselves, the project seeks to unearth, archive and re/present a portrait of this method of communication.
The Tape Letters archive, consisting of participant interviews, cassettes, translations, and photographs, is held at the Bishopsgate Institute in London.
Afshan’s pamphlet was written in response to five of the cassette tapes currently held within the archive.
Suna Afsan was part of the DESIblitz Literature Festival in 2023 and featured in the event Poetry Matters – Poetry & Spoken Word Panel on Saturday, October 28, 2023.