Free for all - online. Register to be sent a link to this pre-recorded event on the day.

Join Damian Le Bas and RSL Fellow Sabrina Mahfouz on a journey from Whitehall across the Middle East via the 'stopping places' of Romany Gypsies, to examine often-unacknowledged aspects of Britain’s colonial past.  

Traversing identity, place, and belonging, this conversation spans decades, borders, ethnicity, and class, considering both how far we've come and how far there is still to go. 

Damian Le Bas is a writer from the south coast of England. His first book, The Stopping Places: A Journey through Gypsy Britain, won the Somerset Maugham award, an RSL Jerwood Award, was Radio 4 Book of the Week and shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman travel book of the year. His next book is due to be published by Chatto & Windus in 2023. 

Sabrina Mahfouz is a writer and performer raised in London and Cairo and working across multiple art forms, including film, TV, opera, dance and music. She is a Royal Society of Literature Fellow and a resident writer at Shakespeare’s Globe. Her previous theatre work includes her sold-out Royal Court show, A History of Water in the Middle East, Chef and Dry Ice. Sabrina has edited the anthologies Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art & Making It Happen, Poems from a Green and Blue Planet and The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write. She is a contributor to the multi-award-winning The Good Immigrant.