Acts of Resistance: Navigating the Patriarchy

Writer, poet and BBC radio presenter Salma El-Wardany performs internationally, has given 2 TEDx Talks and partners with organisations and global brands to have the uncomfortable conversations we’ve ignored for so long. Her work revolves around female stories and bringing the often-ignored realities of women into the spotlight. 

Tina Beattie left her full-time post as Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton in 2020, to concentrate on independent research and writing. In addition to academic monographs published by Routledge, OUP and Continuum, and numerous journal articles and book chapters, she has published two novels –  The Good Priest (2019) and Between Two Rivers (2022). She is interested in the ways in which fictional characters emerge as bearers of complex and conflicted meanings and stories which elude the constraints of academic writing. Between Two Rivers is set in pre-independence Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), and it draws on her many years of living in sub-Saharan Africa. She was born and grew up in Zambia, and has also lived in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Tina moved from Harare to Bristol with her husband Dave and four little children in 1988, and became a mature student at the University of Bristol when her youngest child started school. Dave and she now live on the south coast near Rye.

Reviewing Between Two Rivers, Zimbabwean poet and author Chiedza Musengezi writes that “Beattie explores our humanity in its beauty and brokenness through women’s voices. Fictional voices of the marginalised have been inserted in the recorded history of the country, not to create an alternative history but to add to its rich, multi-faceted texture.”