Ahmed Naji on the Contemporary Reality of the Exiled Writer

This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the new essay collection, Thin Places, and brought to you by Lit Hub Radio.

In this episode, Jordan talks to Ahmed Naji, author of Using Life, about how the experience of imprisonment and then living in exile, particularly exile in America, changed his feelings about writing and about his own identity.

From the interview:

Ahmed Naji: Being an exiled writer is not as it used to be. During, for example, Nabokov’s time or other Russian writers who will flee out of the Soviet Union and come here to United States, and some of them, like Nabokov or Kundera in France, they will choose to leave their language and to adopt a new language and writing it. They will choose to burn the ships and to forget about the past. But now, in our lifetime, it’s not like that. You are not an exile, because you are still able to know what is happening in your motherland through the internet and the source of news. The world’s become so connected. Everything affects everything.

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Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

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Ahmed Naji is a writer, journalist, art critic, and criminal. He is the author of Rogers (2007), Using Life (2014), and And Tigers to My Room (2020). He has won several prizes including a Dubai Press Club Award, a PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award, and an Open Eye Award. He is currently a City of Asylum Fellow at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. ahmednaji.net.