Adnan is a writer who maintains a fierce engagement with political, social and historical realities, one for whom the experience of dislocation and the mediation of distance and longing are predominant themes. At the same time she is an artist acutely engaged with her immediate surroundings, with nature, with color and light -- someone for whom the act of perception is itself the defining moment. Her work, both artistic and literary, builds on myriad junctures between perception, translation, poetic insight, and philosphical paradox; between an interrogation of selfhood and an insistence on being in the world. This merging of artistic and philosphical interrogation with political awareness and a postcolonial sensibility informes her cultural production in striking ways.