Crossing Borders with Álvaro Enrigue, Maureen Freely and Ali Smith

Snape

Britten Studio

08/10/2017 12:00 - 13:00

£12.00  

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Rarely has it felt more necessary for words to transcend the local and help us connect to a wider world. In their works, Ali Smith, Maureen Freely and Álvaro Enrigue cross the boundaries of language, place, culture and gender. An unmissable meeting of minds.

Álvaro Enrigue

Álvaro Enrigue (born in Guadalajara, Mexico) is the award winning author of four novels and two books of short stories. He has been translated into multiple languages, including German, English and French.

In 1996, Enrigue was awarded the prestigious Joaquín Mortiz Prize for his first novel, La muerte de un instalador (Death of an Installation Artist). Since then it has been reprinted five times, and in 2012 it was selected as one of the key novels of the Mexican 20th century, and anthologized by Mexico's largest publishing house, Fondo de Cultura Económica. His books Vidas perpendiculares (Perpendicular Lives) and Hipotermia (Hypothermia) have also been widely acclaimed.

Hypothermia, which offers an "unflinching gaze towards 21st-century life and the immigrant experience", was published in 2013 in the USA and England by Dalkey Archive Press in a translation by Brendan Riley. His latest novel, Decencia (Decency), has received praises in Latin America's and Spain's most relevant publications.

In 2007, he was selected as one of the most influential contemporary writers in Spanish by the Hay Festival's Bogotá39. In 2009, he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Residence Fellowship at the Bellagio Centre to finish the manuscript of his last novel, Decencia (Decency). In 2011 he became a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars of the New York Public Library, where he began working on his fifth novel.[

On November 4, 2013, Enrigue's novel Muerte súbita (Sudden Death) was announced as the winner of the 31st Herralde Novel Prize, joining a distinguished list of works by authors from Spain and Latin America.

Maureen Freely

A journalist, novelist, professor, and translator, Maureen Freely is Head of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University. As the president of English PEN she isactive in various national and international campaigns to champion free expression. Freely is the author of seven novels (Mother’s Helper, The Life of the Party, The Stork Club, Under the Vulcania, The Other Rebecca, Enlightenment, and - most recently - Sailing through Byzantium) as well as three works of non-fiction (Pandora's Clock, What About Us? An Open Letter to the Mothers Feminism Forgot, and The Parent Trap). She has translated five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (Snow, The Black Book, Istanbul: Memories of a City, Other Colours and The Museum of Innocence), she has also translated or co-translated a number of memoirs, biographies, rising stars and 20th century classics. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for three decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing.

Ali Smith

Ali Smith CBE FRSL (born 24 August 1962) is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry has described her as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".

While studying for her PhD at Cambridge Smith wrote several plays which were staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Cambridge Footlights. After some time working in Scotland, she returned to Cambridge to concentrate on her writing, in particular, focussing on short stories and freelancing as the fiction reviewer for The Scotsman newspaper. In 1995 she published her first book, Free Love and Other Stories, a collection of 12 short stories which won the Saltire First Book of the Year award and Scottish Arts Council Book Award.

She writes articles for The Guardian , The ScotsmanNew Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement and in 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Literature