Kamal Al-Solaylee

My guest on this episode Kamal Al-Solaylee. Kamal is the author of the bestselling memoir Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, published in 2012 by HarperCollins Canada, which has published all of his books to date. His second book, Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone) was published in 2016. His most recent book, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From, was published in 2021, and was a Book of the year for the Globe and Mail, the Hill Times and the CBC.  Author Esi Edugyan called Return “an urgent, thought-provoking read with much to say about our future." Kamal is currently the Director of the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia.

 

Kamal and I talk about how his career as a journalist and theatre critic informs his books, how he feels both privileged and compelled to write books that address difficult and serious topics, and how he owes much of his career success to a chance encounter with me about a decade and a half ago. (That’s a joke.)

 

Kamal Al-Solaylee's Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From (HarperCollins Canada).

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Contact Nathan Whitlock at nathanwhitlock.ca/contact