9 July 18:30–20:00 | Nocturne/Blue Light Moon: Public Reading and Interview with Yvonne A. Owuor
Followed by a Conversation with Ana Rocío Jouli.
Part of the EXC 2020 Annual Conference 2025 "Futures of Doing Literature", 9–11 July 2025.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a Kenyan author whose works explore desire, longing, memory, being, and the reimagining of African geopolitics, futures, and world-building. We are pleased to welcome her to this session with a reading from her forthcoming novel Nocturne, followed by an audience Q&A. Audience members are encouraged to reflect on literature as a temporal practice of reckoning and reimagining and consider how narrative forms generate plural futures while unsettling inherited histories and geographies of power.
Born in Nairobi, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland. She served as the executive director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival, where she established its first literary forum. Her novella The Weight of Whispers won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003, and her debut novel Dust (2014, shortlisted for the Folio Prize) has been translated into multiple languages. Her second novel, The Dragonfly Sea (2019), examines historical and contemporary China-East Africa relations through the intimate lives of Swahili Sea characters. A speaker and cultural advocate, Owuor has been recognised with several awards, including Kenya's Head of State Commendation (2016).
In 2018/19, Owuor was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and, later, at the Institute d’études avancées de Nantes. She is working with African producers to train and establish 'writing rooms' to refine African film story development, and is a founder-member of The Elephant, Eastern Africa's foremost digital newspaper. Additionally, she has participated in initiatives fostering East Africa-Asia cultural discourses and co-founded the Macondo Literary Festival. Owuor was Artist in Residence at the Cluster in 2020, and now serves as a member of its International Advisory Board.
Ana Rocío Jouli (Research Area 2: Travelling Matters/Constellations) is an Argentinean poet, researcher and curator. She holds a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the National University of Tres de Febrero and a PhD in Literature from the National University of La Plata. Jouli is currently a postdoctoral researcher at EXC 2020 with a project entitled "Rewriting the Archive – Transdisciplinary Activations in Latin American Literature".
Her poetic practice spans writing, poetry film, voice- and body-based performance and lecture-performances. Her latest publications include Borrador (Draft, poetry film, 2023), Las mejores amigas / Die besten Freundinnen (poetry and sound performance, 2023) and Literatura del más acá (Literature from This Side, poetry and short fiction volume for young readers, 2022). As part of her literary activism, Jouli co-founded Barrio (Bairro) Berlin, a festival that offers a platform for migrant Latin-American voices in the German-speaking world.
Image Credits:
Visual: S. Messner 2025 for EXC 2020 using a photo by Valeria Reverdo on Unsplash.
Profile picture Yvonne A. Owuor: Alvin Pang
Profile picture Ana R. Jouli: Lorenz Brandtner
