Panel: Writing About Resistance

Learn from four authors as they describe their work, the formal decisions they made and how those choices shaped their research and writing. 

About the panelists:

Gilberto Arriaza is a Guatemalan cultural anthropologist and educator who uses fiction to explore the human texture of state repression--from habitual, mundane activities to open rebellion and profound emotions like love, empathy, solidarity, resentment and aggression. His forthcoming book Subversives will be published in May.

Naomi Roht Arriaza is a legal scholar and human rights expert who writes about corrupt regimes where institutions no longer protect citizens' rights but serve to enrich themselves. She uses real-life examples to explore how human rights, anti-corruption and environmental activists have fought back using the courts and the streets. She is the author of Fighting Grand Corruption: Transnational and Human Rights Approaches in Latin America and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Manju Soni is a former eye surgeon turned author. As an anti-Apartheid activist medical student, Manju Soni personally witnessed many dramatic events of the South African liberation struggle, an experience she fleshes out with her research in the archives of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She was born and grew up under apartheid in South Africa where she was introduced to social justice issues at a young age during the Soweto Uprising student protests. Her debut nonfiction book Defying Apartheid captures her experiences during these tumultuous times.

Anne Whiteside is the niece of Maurice Pertschuk, a young SOE agent executed at Buchenwald in 1945. She first studied Franco-British relations listening in on conversations between her French mother and British father. She spent a decade researching The Moon in Splinters, interviewing survivors and painting a picture of civilians who risked everything to overthrow the regime transforming France into a proto-fascist nation.