What and Who are Bodies of Water?

Authors Sabrina Mahfouz and Nina Manandhar speak to host Dalia Al-Dujaili about their latest books and read excerpts from their works.

Sabrina’s book These Bodies of Water takes us on a journey of the Middle-Eastern coastlines and waterways that were so vital to the British Empire’s hold. Combining memoir, history, politics, myth and poetry, These Bodies of Water is a tapestry of writing that tells the unacknowledged story of Britain’s relationship with the Middle East in the most revealing terms.

Nina’s work What We Wore – A People’s History of British Style provides a visual timeline of UK fashion since the 1950s. In What We Wore, crowdsourced family and amateur photos come together to create a makeshift style history of Britain. Taking readers into British homes, onto city streets, into shops, and out to nightclubs and holiday spots, this book features a combination of original images and intriguing personal anecdotes that document the changes in fashion and style in Britain over fifty years.

In this talk, we’ll ask how migration and our relationship to bodies of water have impacted our cultural understanding of what it means to be British and how we express British identity through style, history, art and literature.

About the speakers 

Sabrina Mahfouz (pictured) is a multiple award-winning playwright, lyricist, poet and screenwriter based between London, LA and Cairo. She’s worked with HBO, A24/Amazon Studios, Netflix, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and more. She wrote and performed her cross-genre show A History of Water in the Middle East at the Royal Court Theatre.

Sabrina has written a part-memoir, part-history book, These Bodies of Water: A Personal History of the British Empire and the Middle East; is the editor of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write; Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making It Happen; Poems for a Green and Blue Planet, and is an essay contributor to the multi-award-winning The Good Immigrant. 

Nina Manandhar’s (pictured) photographs and curated projects explore contemporary global youth identity and the meaning of style. She is the author of What We Wore – A People’s History of British Style, published by Prestel. She has presented projects at The Photographers Gallery, The Museum Of London, RIBA, Tate, ICA and The Wellcome Collection. She is Stage 2 Lead on the Fashion Communications BA at Central Saint Martins.