Using Fiction to Understand International Relations, History, and Conflict

Ava Homa is an acclaimed author, speaker, activist, and faculty member at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her debut novel, Daughters of Smoke and Fire (HarperCollins & Abrams, 2020), was featured in Roxane Gay’s Book Club, the Unplugged Book Box, and Women for Women International. The novel earned a place among the ‘best books’ in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Independent (UK), and Globe and Mail (Canada). It received the 2020 Nautilus Silver Book Award for Fiction and was a 2022 William Saroyan International Writing Prize finalist. A groundbreaking work in English by a Kurdish woman, Daughters of Smoke and Fire has been incorporated into university curricula at institutions such as George Mason University, the University of Toronto, and Southern Methodist University.

The talk will explore how fiction can help us understand international relations, history, and conflict. Fiction allows the author and reader to consider different factors in a manner that might not be visible in a “real-life” case study. The talk would also discuss works of fiction (aside from this book) that cover underrepresented regions and people as well as the natural limits of the genre.