Age guidance: All welcome
What do climate collapse, interstellar travel, revolution, memory and identity have in common? They all provide fertile ground for imagining new worlds.
As part of our Imagined Worlds season, join E. J. Swift, Temi Oh and Mahmud El Sayed for a conversation about speculative fiction’s ability to challenge assumptions, explore big ideas and offer fresh perspectives on our future. Expect an engaging discussion spanning science fiction, fantasy, Arabfuturism and beyond, followed by audience questions.
Mahmud El Sayed is a British-Egyptian writer. He lives in East London where he spends his time pondering linguistic oddities and running story ideas by his cat. A former journalist, he covered ‘serious’ Middle Eastern politics until he had enough of chasing people up for boring quotes and decided to write about generation ships, sentient libraries and memory taxes instead.
He won the 2023 Future Worlds prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour. His debut novel, The Republic of Memory, was published in 2026 with Gollancz and Saga Press and is a work of Arabfuturism inspired by the real-world events of the Arab Spring.
Temi Oh wrote her debut novel, DO YOU DREAM OF TERRA TWO? while studying Neuroscience. The book went on to win the American Library Association’s Alex Award in 2020 and was named an NPR Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of MORE PERFECT and NOT WITH A BANG (Spring 2026), as well as short fiction for Marvel’s Black Panther and Doctor Who.
Temi is an award-winning screenwriter whose credits include the Netflix series Castlevania: Nocturne and the CBBC drama Silverpoint. She has also written two original short films: Murmur (Sky Arts/BFI) and Uncanny Device (Four:8 Productions).
E. J. Swift is a speculative fiction writer based in London. She is the 2026 winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Best Novel Award from the British Science Fiction Association for When There Are Wolves Again. It was also a Guardian best science fiction book of 2025. Her previous novels include The Osiris Project trilogy, Paris Adrift and The Coral Bones, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Kitschies’ Red Tentacle, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel.
Length: 1:15 hours
