Kiran Desai in Conversation with Homi Bhabha

Kiran Desai is one of the most influential novelists writing in English today.

Her 2006 novel The Inheritance of Loss stretched the formal capacities of the novel to capture postcolonial experience, and her new work, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025), has continued to reinvent the novel form in relation to the experience of global modernity. Homi Bhabha is the world’s leading thinker of postcolonial writing, whose work has provided us with the vocabulary with which we approach not only postcolonial life, but the contemporary condition more broadly. 

Their discussion will bring together fiction and theory, literature and philosophy, in order to ask how far our literary and critical institutions are able to offer counterimages to the forces producing the word picture today.

About Utopia Now! Conference

This international conference sets out to explore the possibility of utopian imagining today, at a time when many of our social, political and environmental conditions are in crisis. 

The conference brings together writers and thinkers from across disciplines, to produce a mobile critical picture of the condition of utopian thought now. The keynotes (Ali Smith, Kiran Desai, Homi Bhabha) bring literary fiction into dialogue with philosophy and critical theory. The panels bring together thinkers from the environmental humanities, the medical humanities, linguistics, film studies, literary studies and political theory, among other disciplinary formations. 

In exploring the possibility of utopian thought today, the conference will offer a fresh reflection on the ways in which our aesthetic, critical and discursive forms are able to summon pictures of a better world. 

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