Moderated by Torsten Jost

Part of the EXC 2020 Annual Conference 2025 "Futures of Doing Literature", 9–11 July 2025. 

In a present shaped by colonial legacies, uneven modernities and persistent forms of violence and exclusion – along lines of race, class, religion and gender – what forms of profound and enduring repair work can storytelling imagine across differently situated worlds? Novelist and essayist Saskya Jain engages this question through readings from her work and a discussion of a writer's tools within a fractured and crisis-ridden global landscape. With a distinctive blend of empathy and humour, Jain's novels Fire Under Ash (2014) and Geeta Rahman at Championship Point (2021) explore the layered and often dissonant temporalities that shape the urban experience in New Delhi as a dense archive of memory, rupture and contested futurities. Her fiction traces how lives are affected by intersecting and often conflicting histories while unsettling dominant narratives of progress and belonging. Informed by Saidiya Hartman's notion of "stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations" and grounded in cross-cultural experience, Jain's work opens imaginative spaces for alternative ways of seeing, feeling and relating – across borders, identities and times.