Join us at the first London launch of No God but Us, the debut novel by Bobuq Sayed. Bobuq will be joined in conversation by editor Farhaana Arefin.

‘Compassionate without veering into sentimentality, the novel explores migration, identity and chosen family with quiet emotional precision, asking what it truly means to build a home from exile.’ — Service95

When Delbar’s double life is outed to his mother, he flees his Afghan American community and takes refuge with his aunt in Istanbul. There he meets another Afghan, Mansur, who has made his own sacrifices to leave his family in Iran and migrate to Turkey.

At an NGO supporting queer and trans refugees, Delbar and Mansur find comfort in each other and the company of new friends. But Turkish state repression is escalating, and as their pathways to security diverge, the fault lines between them become impossible to ignore.

Bobuq Sayed is an Afghan cultural worker whose writing explores themes of migration, Islam and queer sexuality. They are the author of A Brief History of Australian Terror, a chapbook of essays, and the co-editor of Nothing to Hide: Voices from Trans and Gender Diverse Australia. A 2022–23 Steinbeck fellow at San José State University, a Lambda Literary scholar, and an award-winning James A. Michener fellow in the University of Miami’s MFA programme in creative writing, Bobuq lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Farhaana Arefin is the publisher and managing director at Hajar Press, an independent political publishing house by and for people of colour, which she co-founded in 2020. She is the editor of the elements anthology series, of which the first volume, The Hajar Book of Rage, was published in 2025.

Visit Eventbrite to reserve a free ticket.