Kiran Desai in Conversation with Homi Bhabha

Kiran Desai and Homi Bhabha are coming together for a conversation at the Schwarzman Centre on Sunday 15 November, from 6:30pm to 7:30pm. It's part of Utopia Now!, an international conference presented by the Faculty of English that asks whether utopian imagining is still possible against a backdrop of social, political and environmental crisis. The whole day pairs writers and thinkers from across different disciplines, and the art on display is by Marco Brambilla.

Desai is one of the most influential novelists writing in English today. Her 2006 novel, The Inheritance of Loss, stretched the formal capacities of the novel to capture postcolonial experience, and her 2025 work, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, has continued to reinvent the form in relation to global modernity. Bhabha is described as the world's leading thinker of postcolonial writing, a critical theorist whose work on hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence provided one of the most enduring frameworks for understanding the postcolonial condition and modernity itself. Their conversation brings fiction and theory, literature and philosophy, into dialogue.

It's a pairing that makes sense when you look at what they both do: Desai works with the postcolonial experience through the novel, and Bhabha has spent his career building the theoretical language we use to talk about it. Hearing them go back and forth on the same ground, one from the world of fiction and the other from critical theory, is exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary conversation Utopia Now! is built around. The session runs for an hour, from 6:30pm to 7:30pm, at the Schwarzman Centre, Oxford Theatre, Oxford OX2 6AH.