Associate Artist

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

Associate Artist 20-21

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, poet, speaker and educator born in Bradford and raised in Leeds. She is the author of poetry collection, Postcolonial Banter (Verve Poetry Press, 2019), co-author of the anthology, A FLY GIRL’S GUIDE TO UNIVERSITY: Being a woman of colour at Cambridge and other institutions of power and elitism (Verve Poetry Press, 2019) and host of the Breaking Binaries podcast. Most of Suhaiymah’s work grapples with questions of history, race and power – interrogating mainstream narratives about Muslims, migrants, violence and more. She has written for The Guardian, Independent, Al-Jazeera and her work has been featured across national media outlets as well as on University and school syllabi. Suhaiymah regularly facilitates workshops and gives lectures on, as well as campaigns against, Islamophobia and other state-sanctioned forms of racism. In 2019 she was commissioned separately by The Albany and the Free Word Centre to develop larger-scale performance pieces exploring the themes of her work, which she was granted Arts Council funding for (The Albany piece). She is now eager to use the role with Freedom Studios to develop her writing into an arena that allows for a different and exciting mode of story-telling and truth-speaking.