Oct
19
3:15pm
Festival of the Future City: Musa Okwonga
By Bristol Ideas
Writer, broadcaster and musician Musa Okwonga talks about his new novel and the city of Berlin.
Okwonga’s In the End, It Was All About Love is a great Berlin story – but it is also about the ills and troubles challenging the world and us. The narrator arrives in Berlin, a place famed for its hedonism, to find peace and maybe love; only to discover that the problems which have long haunted him have arrived there too, and are more present than ever.
As he approaches his fortieth birthday, nearing the age where his father was killed in a brutal revolution, he drifts through this endlessly addictive and sometimes mystical city, through its slow days and bottomless nights, wondering whether he will ever escape the damage left by his father’s death. With the world as a whole more uncertain, as both the far-right and global temperatures rise at frightening speed, he finds himself fighting a fierce inner battle against his turbulent past, for a future free of his fear of failure, of persecution, and of intimacy.
In The End, It Was All About Love is a journey of loss and self-acceptance that takes its nameless narrator all the way through bustling Berlin to his roots, a quiet village on the Uganda-Sudan border. It is a bracingly honest story of love, sexuality and spirituality; of racism, dating, and alienation; of fleeing the greatest possible pain, and of the hopeful road home.
Supported by Visit Britain.
It’s important to us that ideas and debate are affordable to everyone. It’s also important that our commentators, artists, writers, poets and thinkers are paid. You are invited to choose your own contribution to the event. All proceeds go towards supporting our speakers and sustaining Bristol Ideas.
If you miss the live event or just want to watch it again, the recording will be available on the event page just a few minutes after the live stream ends.
Our Privacy Policy can be found on our website.
hosted by
Bristol Ideas
share