Monday 20th April 2026
6.30 to 9pm
We are so delighted to welcome back Balsam Karam and Nathalie Olah for a conversation about Balsam's newly translated novel Event Horizon, translated by Saskia Vogel, precursor to her incredible English language debut The Singularity (2024).
Seventeen-year-old Milde is from the Outskirts, a place beyond the mountains where the dirt is corpse-rich, where mothers and daughters, banished from society, make their living – without rights, access to care, or legal status. But Milde refuses to accept the order of things and, together with some friends, she revolts against the government’s injustice.
Arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, Milde is eventually presented with a final choice: to be executed publicly or, as part of an experiment, to be launched into space, into a black hole called the Mass. She chooses the Mass, opting to face its fathomless depth and loneliness rather than hurt the morale of her weary allies back home. Collapsing and expanding myth and reality, Event Horizon is an exquisite existential novel, dark as deep space, woven with reflections on oppression, solidarity, trauma and loss. ‘Karam is a terrific prose stylist. Many of her sentences are surprising in their syntactical innovation and unique poetic rhythm. Like Virginia Woolf, Karam is interested in fragments, and in how they can fit and flow together.
Praise for The Singularity....
There is a choral quality to her writing, and a rich philosophical undertow to many of her observations…. The Singularity sweeps us along, offering profound wisdoms on motherhood and migration, war, home and grief.’
Yagnishsing Dawoor, Times Literary Supplement
‘The Singularity, the second novel (and first to be published in English) by Balsam Karam … is evidence of the unique genius of human creativity…. Language is at the heart of The Singularity, moving as it does from chaos and cacophony to the simple purity of a single voice, which is one measure of its brilliance and its beauty.’
John Self, Observer
About the Author & Translator
Balsam Karam (b. 1983) is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author, librarian and university lecturer, and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize. Her second novel, The Singularity, was shortlisted for the August Prize and was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2024.
Nathalie Olah is the author of three works of cultural criticism, Steal as much as you can (Repeater 2019), Look Again: Class (Tate Publishing) and Bad Taste (Dialogue 2023). She regularly contributes text for major gallery exhibitions and her art writing has been published in The TLS, Art Review, The Guardian, Tate Etc. and Tribune. She is currently based in London.