Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie speaks of the danger of a single story. If we only read stories about people like us, how can we hope to understand people who are different? And if we only read stories about people who are different, how can we hope to understand ourselves? We must, Adichie says, read a range of stories if we want to make sense of ourselves, and our world. The World Stories Flexible Friday was born of this idea.

When we read stories from other cultures, we have no choice but to look at other people’s worlds through other people’s eyes. This can help us to see that, as human beings, nothing human is alien to us.

This is something we tried to explore during the English department’s Flexible Friday.