Salman Rushdie’s Victory City: What Does It Teach Us About Building Great Cities? (Bristol Ideas)

To celebrate the release of Salman Rushdie’s Victory City, Bristol Ideas hosts a panel event to discuss imaginary cities, how to build a great city, tolerance, women and cities, leadership by women in Bristol, freedom of expression, the growth of ancient cities, and how stories like this can help us with city building and renewal.

It was recently announced that Salman Rushdie would not be doing any publicity to promote his new novel, following the attack on him at the Chautauqua Institution in New York last year, which left him blind in one eye and without the use of one hand. Bristol Ideas presents a panel of leading writers and thinkers to discuss Bisnaga and the lessons for cities today.

Salman Rushdie’s new novel Victory City tells the story of the legendary southern Indian city Vijayanagara, Bisnaga – Victory City, and the remarkable Pampa Kampana who provides the seeds for the city literally and sees its rise and fall over more than two centuries. In this epic tale, Kampana has a divine encounter. The goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city. After she summons the city into existence, Kampana embarks on a journey to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world, in a tolerant city that celebrates diversity, words, art and poetry.

Darran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between, a work of creative non-fiction exploring the intersection between mapped cities and imagination, analysing our relationship with our urban past. He will be joined by barrister Susie Alegre, author of Freedom to Think: Protecting a Fundamental Human Right in the Digital Age, and Sian Norris – whose Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global is out in June. Both Freedom to Think and Imaginary Cities have featured as books of the year in the Financial Times.

‘I have always been a supporter of freedom of thought and freedom of expression,’ says Andrew Kelly, chair of the panel discussion and director of Festival of the Future City. ‘I was in Bradford and saw The Satanic Verses being burned on the street. Seeing this strengthened what I believed in, and it was this belief and commitment that led me to set up Festival of Ideas 18 years ago. It was an honour, many years later, to interview Salman on stage in Bristol in our festival. We hoped then that the relative freedom he enjoyed would continue, but the murder attempt showed the threat is always there. I very much hope that we will be able to welcome Salman to Bristol again and we wish him well in his recovery.’

Salman Rushdie's Victory City: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/11279/97817...
Darran Anderson's Imaginary Cities: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/11279/97809...
Susie Alegre's Freedom to Think: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/11279/97818...

Presented by Bristol Ideas: https://www.bristolideas.co.uk/