Temporary People: Author Reading and Discussion
- Organizer: Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
- Venue: 20 Cooper Square, Room 471
- Address: New York, NY 10003 United States
Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program in the NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis. Cosponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
”In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labour force works without the rights of citizenship, endures miserable living conditions, and must eventually leave the country. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called ‘guest workers’ of the Gulf has been barely addressed in fiction.”
“Temporary People is a brave, stylistically inventive book that presents a frightening, surreal world that’s all too true to life. Its publication couldn’t be more timely given the current outcries for and against immigrants, bans, raids, and mass deportations. As an antidote to border politics, Unnikrishnan’s stories serve as both testimony and oracle to be read with grave urgency.” —CS Monitor
Deepak Unnikrishnan is a writer from Abu Dhabi and now, Chicago. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at New York University Abu Dhabi. His fictions and essays have appeared in Guernica, Drunken Boat and Himal Southasian. In 2014 he won the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award, and in 2015 he was included in WigLeaf’s Top 50 (very) Short Fictions, edited by Roxane Gay. Temporary People was recently awarded the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
Queries: ss162@nyu.edu