Description: Reversing the usual refugee story clichés, Homing Birds shares the hopes, fears and aspirations of a young man searching for a place in which he feels he truly belongs.
Brief description: Award-winning writer Rukhsana Ahmad has written and adapted many plays for stage and BBC Radio. River on Fire was a finalist in the Susan Smith Blackburn Awards, Wide Sargasso Sea was a finalist for the Writers' Guild Award for Best Radio Adaptation and Song for a Sanctuary was a finalist for the CRE award for best original radio drama. Other plays include Mistaken: Annie Besant in India and Letting Go. She has also written fiction: The Hope Chest and The Gatekeeper's Wife and other stories. She has also translated We Sinful Women, a collection of contemporary Urdu feminist poetry and The One Who Did Not Ask by Altaf Fatima. REVIEWS OF PREVIOUS WORK "... the debates about belief and faith are clear and compelling and the play also bravely grapples with big spiritual ideas..." - Aleks Sierz, theatre critic "... sensitive approach gives painful credibility to the dilemmas facing women with nowhere else to go." - The Independent
Review Quotes:
"Through a story about death and loss, the play exposes the gaps between memories and a gendered reality, focusing on the dynamics of identity and transformation through lived experience. As the story of someone recovering from the trauma of war and displacement unfolds, inevitably, it pulls in those subjects creating a layered backdrop. When Saeed returns to Kabul, he's forced to experience real life hardships that ordinary citizens must face and confront the clash between political ideals and the reality on the ground." - This Week Culture
"Structured through a series of flashbacks to his childhood in Afghanistan, the play discusses the issues that so many talented young Afghans face when searching for a safe new life abroad and how in order to move Kabul into the 21st century, the city then needs the same citizens to come back and re-build. If the talented people who fled for safety were to return, would it change things for the better?" - Drama and Theatre
"A work of significance and spirited potency, a deep and intelligent examination of people and themes too rarely presented on stage" - The Spy In The Stalls.