Dr Ariel Kahn is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Middlesex University, where he is Programme Leader for the BA in Creative Writing and Journalism, Director of Programmes for Creative Writing, Journalism and Theatre, and a key member of the MDX Interfaith Network, which won the Universities Alliance Award 2024 for promoting community cohesion.
His novel Raising Sparks (2018) was shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker Prize, and focused on the ways faith can create connections between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the contemporary Middle East. The Irish Times described it as “like Marquez in Jaffa”. Raising Sparks is on university curricula in both the US and Europe. He has a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, an MA in Indian and African Literature from SOAS and a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University.
He initially trained for three years as a rabbi in Israel, before shifting direction to creative writing. As a result of his religious and academic training, he has a deep commitment to the culture and creative practice as drivers of empathy, insight and mutual understanding. For seven years, together with Palestinian novelist Samir el Youssef, he ran the Arab Israeli Book club, which The Guardian described as a “roaring success”.
He also regularly collaborates with the charity Exiled Writers Ink to create interfaith cultural and literary events and courses, most recently on an interfaith poetry workshop and reading at the Big Iftar 2024 at Middlesex and was a keynote speaker at Beyond the Stereotypes of Muslims and Jews, in 2023. In addition to mentoring refugee writers with this organisation, he created and co-taught Towards an Open Land; Literary Activism: On the Frontline Together, with Bangladeshi national poet, Shamim Azad, an Interfaith Creative Writing workshop series aimed at Muslim and Jewish writers held at SOAS in 2019.
In addition to his fiction, his published research focuses on feminist responses to the tensions between faith and culture through the representations of migrant and refugee Jewish narratives in comic and graphic novel form, most recently in Jewish Women: Bodies and Borders (McFarlands, 2023) which won the 2024 South Atlantic MLA Book Award, as well as Graphic Details, Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics (ed Sarah Lightman, McFarlands), which won the Eisner Award for Comics Scholarship in 2015, and the Susan Koppelman Prize for Best Edited Book on Feminist Studies and on “Reframing Notions of Self and Other in Contemporary Israeli Graphic Narratives”, in Jewish Graphic Novels, (Baskin & Omer-Sherman, Eds.) NY: Rutgers University Press (2010).
Developing innovative ways to create a deeper dialogue between academic research, creative practitioners and the wider public, he has curated several conversations and immersive workshops with Jewish comics artists, at Jewish Book Week in London (most recently in 2023) and at the British Library as part of their Comics Unmasked Exhibition in 2014. He has been invited to address the Ninth Annual Oxford Summer Institute Conference, 2024 On Modern & Contemporary Judaism, discussing Jewish Travel Comics as Intergenerational Feminist Spiritual Quests. He is a Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford University in 2024-2025, with a combined creative practice and interfaith brief.
