Safiya Sinclair, HOW TO SAY BABYLON: A Memoir
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.4 • 602 Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Zibby speaks to Jamaican poet and memoirist Safiya Sinclair about How to Say Babylon, a dazzling and powerful book about the author’s struggle to break free of her father’s oppression as part of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing. Safiya describes how her mother and her profound love of books and learning got her through a brutal childhood. She also talks about the mentor who betrayed her; her journey of healing and forgiveness; the novel she is working on; and the Jamaican books she is reading and loving.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. |
| 0:06.7 | This 30-minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, 365 days a year, for about 30 minutes. |
| 0:14.9 | I am also the publisher for Zibi Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir. |
| 0:21.9 | Our books are already out now. |
| 0:23.5 | You can check it out on ZippyBooks.com. |
| 0:25.6 | And we have a magazine called Zibby Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle |
| 0:31.2 | features. |
| 0:31.8 | That's at Zibbymag.com. |
| 0:33.1 | We have classes at Zippy Classes.com. |
| 0:35.4 | And I recently opened a bookstore in L.a called zibby's bookshop |
| 0:40.3 | at one one one three montana avenue at 11th street in san monica i hope that you are able to |
| 0:47.0 | enjoy some of our other offerings but this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in |
| 0:53.3 | 2018 and no matter what i do this is basically my of all of it and started in 2018. |
| 0:57.5 | And no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing. |
| 0:58.0 | Enjoy. |
| 1:06.8 | Safia Sinclair is the author of How to Say Babylon, a memoir. |
| 1:10.0 | Safia was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. |
| 1:11.6 | She is the author of How to Say Babylon, forthcoming from Simon and Schuster. She is also the author of the poetry collection |
| 1:17.1 | Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf |
| 1:22.9 | Award, the O.C.M. Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phyllis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. |
| 1:31.3 | Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association's notable books of the year, and was a finalist for the Penn Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was long-listed for the Penn Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Sinclair's other honors include a Pushcart Prize, Fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Sivatella Rainiery Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, McDowell, Yado, the Breadloaf Riders Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, |
| 2:01.1 | Granta, the Nation, Poetry, Kenyan Review, the Oxford American, and elsewhere. She received her MFA |
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