About this Event
Join us with Zahirra Dayal in conversation with Zoe Flood to discuss their latest novel: The Whispering Jacarandas - a haunting debut that unfolds in the charged aftermath of Zimbabwe’s independence.
In the leafy suburb of Belvedere, sisters Zaynah and Amira grow up within the shelter of a close-knit Indian community, until one night of violence shatters their childhood and leaves an unspoken rift between them.
As the sisters navigate adolescence under the shadow of silence, their paths diverge: one drawn inward into secrecy, the other seeking escape in rebellion. Against a backdrop of political upheaval and simmering racial tensions, they must confront the weight of trauma and the fragility of identity, as they struggle to repair the fractured threads of sisterhood.
Lyrical and devastating, The Whispering Jacarandas evokes the beauty and resilience of its namesake blooms while exploring how love, loyalty, and the search for belonging endure in even the harshest of landscapes.
Zahirra Dayal was born in Zimbabwe, has lived in four different countries and now calls London home, where she works as an academic skills lecturer. Her short stories have been published in literary magazines including The Mechanics Institute Review; her poetry appers in Tesserae: a mosaic of poetry by Zimbabwean women and Remembrance: an anthology of South Asian poetry compiled by Third Space. Her work explores unbelonging, marginalisation and racial dynamics and she is interested in confronting silences and concerned with never looking away. The Whispering Jacarandas won The Jericho Writers Friday Night Live, was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award, the Mslexia Prize and The SI Leeds Literary
Zoe Flood is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker who reports on the consequences of conflict for leading international media. She has shot, produced and directed multiple investigative films for BBC Africa Eye, and has worked on two BAFTA-winning documentaries. As a writer, her long read on the – mostly Zimbabwean – team in Botswana who first sequenced Omicron won ‘Feature of the Year’ in the 2022 British Association of Science Writers Awards.Zoe was based in Nairobi for ten years, reporting from across the region, where she also served for two years as Chair of the Foreign Correspondents' Association of East Africa. She spent significant periods of her childhood in Zimbabwe, where her mother was born and where her structural engineer grandmother played a leading role in the design of some of the country’s most iconic buildings. Zoe has reported extensively from Zimbabwe, including covering the fall of Robert Mugabe. She wrote her undergraduate thesis at Oxford on the liberation war and executive/co-produced the first Zimbabwean feature film to be acquired by Netflix
Event venue & nearby stays
Waterstones, 11 Islington Green, London, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.