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Laila Lalami’s award-winning novel The Moor’s Account reconstructs the pioneering and epic journeys of Estebanico, a Moroccan slave who was among the four survivors of the disastrous Spanish Narvaez expedition to Florida in 1527. He is a historical figure, mentioned in Cabeza de Vaca’s eyewitness account of that journey during which the members of the expedition were lost in alien North America and separated from their known world until they reached Mexico (New Spain) eight years later. In this interview conducted by email in May 2015, Laila Lalami comments on her reconstruction of Estebanico’s scantily recorded story and the suppressed narratives of Spain and the New World, barely four decades after the Fall of Granada and Columbus’s discovery of the America in 1492.

Carlo Coppola’s invaluable work Urdu Poetry: 1935–1970: The Progressive Episode explores the history of “progressivism” (tarraqqi pasand), which transformed Urdu literature. Considering literary, p...

This interview with poet Moniza Alvi looks at issues of British‐ness, cultural duality and gender. Alvi also discusses her childhood in Hertfordshire, where Pakistan was a distant dream rather than a reality and which she reclaimed in her work, and which led her later to explore the surreal realms of the imagination. She goes on to speak on the themes of war and violence, mythology and gender which permeate her recent poetry collections.

Today Pakistan is at the centre of geopolitical conflict and has been overtaken by increasing violence and religious extremism. At the same time, it has witnessed a great flourishing of new cultura...

by Nafisa Hoodbhoy, London, Anthem Press, 2011, 268 pp., £14.99, ISBN 978 0 8572 8967 4 In 1984, Nafisa Hoodbhoy became the first woman reporter at Pakistan’s leading English daily, Dawn, which had...