It Sounds Like Courage — Anoushka Shankar's Refugee Week Showcase
Sitar virtuoso and activist Anoushka Shankar curates a night of music and spoken word celebrating solidarity with displaced people at the Royal Festival Hall.
Why we picked this
Anoushka Shankar has spent years making music that holds more than one cultural inheritance at once — making her a precise choice to open Refugee Week 2026 with something that is neither a benefit concert nor a ceremony but a performance about belonging.
Anoushka Shankar is a sitar player and composer with a career that spans both the classical Hindustani tradition she inherited from her father Ravi Shankar and a sustained engagement with contemporary and electronic music. She is also an activist whose advocacy for refugees and survivors of violence has shaped her public life as directly as her musicianship has. Both of those commitments inform her curation of It Sounds Like Courage, the opening night of Southbank Centre’s Refugee Week 2026 programme.
The programme carries the overall theme of Courage. Shankar’s event is designed around solidarity, creativity, and community rather than mourning or witness — the distinction the organizers are drawing is between an event that centres the experiences of displaced people and one that asks an audience to simply observe them. Featured performers include poet and novelist Salena Godden, poet Nikita Gill, and Palestinian singer Nai Barghouti, who will be joined by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Additional acts are to be announced.
Hosting duties fall to comedian Nish Kumar, whose own political comedy has become one of the more precise instruments in British public life for addressing subjects the mainstream often mishandles. Refugee Week continues at Southbank Centre through June 28 with Elif Shafak’s inaugural Counterpoints Lecture and an Arab Film Club screening curated by Sarah Agha.