Shifting Sands, Five Years On: What Future for the Middle East?

In 2015, the acclaimed writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh was a guest selector for Edinburgh International Book Festival, presenting a series of events exploring the past, present and future of the Middle East. With memories of the region’s 2011 uprisings still front of mind, a range of experts engaged in passionate, deeply thoughtful discourse about the challenges and opportunities for the Middle East’s contested lands and long-suffering people.

Those events were so engaging that Profile Books published Shifting Sands, edited by Shehadeh and Penny Johnson, which collected the key arguments made on the Edinburgh stages. Today, the Middle East remains an intriguing area of opportunity and conflict, but with its cultural life as relevant as ever.

In this unmissable event, Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson bring together several of the book’s contributors – historian Khaled Fahmy, journalist Alev Scott, novelist Mai Al-Nakib, sociologist Salim Tamari and historian Avi Shlaim, to revisit their ideas.

This is a pre-recorded event.

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Sunday 14 April

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