Ithaca College

            The ongoing series of blogs, user-generated contests and special events that form Ithaca College’s Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) will continue on Sunday, April 11, as FLEFF partners with Buffalo Street Books to present a reading by renowned fiction writer Sorayya Khan. Beginning at 4 p.m. at Buffalo Street Books in the DeWitt Mall in Ithaca, the free event will include offering complimentary copies of Khan’s second novel “Five Queen’s Road” to the first 10 people to come to the reading.

Currently living in Ithaca with her husband and two children, Khan was born in Vienna to a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother. In 1972, at age 10, Khan and her parents moved to Pakistan, where she graduated from the International School of Islamabad. She later received degrees from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and Colorado’s Graduate School of International Studies.

            Her first novel, “Noor,” published in 2003 and set in modern Pakistan, shows how a child’s drawings bring a family to confront long-suppressed betrayals and disillusionments. Her 2008 novel “Five Queen’s Road,” also set in Pakistan, is the tale of a Hindu landlord living in a house with a Muslim family and a Dutch woman bearing the physical and emotional scars of World War II. Slowly, the residents in the house at Five Queen’s Road discover that they share much more than they had imagined.

In addition to her novels, Khan has published in numerous literary journals, including the “Kenyon Review,” “North American Review” and “Asian American Pacific Journal.” Her work has been anthologized in such collections as Bapsi Sidhwa’s “City of Sin and Splendor: Writings on Lahore.”

Launched in 1997, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival was an outreach project from the Center for the Environment at Cornell University. In 2005 the festival moved permanently to Ithaca College, where it is housed in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies as a program to link intellectual inquiry and debate to larger global issues.

For more information on FLEFF 2009–10, visit www.ithaca.edu/fleff or contact Patricia R. Zimmermann, FLEFF co-director, at patty@ithaca.edu.