Norris, author of Five Rivers Met in a Wooded Plain, introduces his new novel Turning for Home, an emotional story of family gathering, human frailty and the marks that love leaves on us. Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing won the Costa First Novel Award. She talks about her new story Whistle in the Dark, which examines the aftermath of a teenager’s four-day mysterious disappearance. Chaired by Thea Lenarduzzi of the TLS.

Psicólogo experimental y profesor de la Universidad de Harvard, Steven Pinker se ha convertido en uno de los escritores más destacados sobre el lenguaje, la mente y la naturaleza humana a nivel internacional. Ha recibido numerosos premios por sus libros, entre los que destacan, Cómo funciona la mente, El instinto del lenguaje, La tabla rasa y Los ángeles que llevamos dentro. Su último libro, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, está dedicado al arte de escribir bien en nuestros días.

Con el apoyo de The Canada Council for the Arts y Blue Metropolis Festival

El escritor y educador Ryan Gattis (Estados Unidos) ha escrito la novela Seis días, sobre los tristemente famosos disturbios raciales acontecidos en la ciudad de Los Ángeles en el año 1992, cuando, tras el apaleamiento de Rodney King, un hombre negro, a manos de tres miembros de raza blanca de las fuerzas policiales de la ciudad, los disturbios y la violencia se extendieron como la pólvora. Ryan conversará con Gaby Wood sobre este episodio y la valoración y reflexiones después de más de veinte años de un suceso cuyo impacto todavía se siente en la actualidad en la sociedad estadounidense.

Se ofrecerá traducción simultánea del inglés al español

La escritora finlandesa Katja Kettu es autora de La comadrona, la historia de una mujer que vive en Laponia en 1944 cuya vida cambiará al conocer a un oficial de las SS del que se enamorará hasta el punto de seguirle a un campo de prisioneros. Kim Thúy, autora de origen vietnamita afincada en Canadá, ha escrito la aclamada novela Ru, en la que una mujer repasa sus recuerdos desde su infancia en una familia rica de Saigón a su huida del régimen comunista en busca de una nueva vida.

Con el apoyo de The Canada Council for the Arts, Blue Metropolis Festival y Finnish Institute

The Welsh publishing house throws a poetry party featuring four new collections from supremely talented poets. Costa Award-winning Jonathan Edwards reads from Gen – a book of sharp yet beautifully warm and humane poems. The title refers to people of Edwards’ generation and his recognition of the preoccupations of the age group that he shares. Catherine Fisher’s first collection for twenty years is The Bramble King, which includes poems on imaginary planets and princes, on the summer solstice, on drawing, on a glass shop – and a clockwork crow (title of her Blue Peter Award-shortlisted children’s book). Rhiannon Hooson’s beautifully resonant first collection The Other City was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. Elizabeth Parker’s In Her Shambles is a fantastic debut of spikey, provocative, declamatory and wonderfully energetic poems. All four poets contribute to Seren's new Poems from The Borders anthology published in celebration of the English/Welsh Marches.

The award-winning French academic and architect (Museum for Contemporary Art in Rome – MACRO; Phantom Restaurant Opera Garnier), awarded Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur (2003) and International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, discusses where contemporary architecture is headed, with the Executive Director of the Pritzker Prize and Associate Dean of the IE School of Architecture.

Professor Littlemore and Dr Turner are co-investigators on the project ‘Death before Birth’. This examines how people who have experienced miscarriage, termination for foetal anomaly, and stillbirth, reach decisions concerning what happens to their babies after death, how their perceptions of the law impact on their decision-making, and how they communicate their experiences and choices to those there to support them. The project will also be examining the existing guidance on what happens to babies after they have died, investigating how it is interpreted in practice by professionals and the extent to which it takes account of the views, experiences and needs of the bereaved. Jeannette and Sarah will be talking about the ways in which people who have experienced pregnancy loss, and those who support, use language to make sense of and communicate their feelings about their loss.

El etnolingüista Jon Landaburu, que ha dedicado su vida al conocimiento de las lenguas indígenas de Colombia, la prestigiosa escritora indígena canadiense Marie Annharte Baker y Wieldler Guerra, antropólogo de la comunidad Wayuu, charlarán con Juan Luis Mejía, Rector de la Universidad EAFIT, sobre la importancia de las culturas indígenas y su lenguaje creativo en la historia contemporánea.

Evento patrocinado por Sura

Con el apoyo de la iniciativa Canada en las Américas del McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, The Canada Council for the Arts y Blue Metropolis Festival

In this second annual lecture, the renowned translator pays tribute to his peerless, multilingual colleague Anthea Bell, who died in October 2018. He explores her work on the Asterix books, translating the original French by René Goscinny and his illustrator partner Albert Uderzo. “She was an elegant stylist, but more than that, a startlingly versatile one,” says Hahn “I first learned her name, as so many people did, because she wrote all those impossible Asterix jokes I loved so much; but to other people she was Sebald, or perhaps Kafka – or sometimes Freud. She was Cornelia Funke or Erich Kästner for children, Saša Stanišić and Stefan Zweig for adults, and so many others besides. Literature struggles to thrive without translation. Today I can’t help wondering how we readers and writers ever could have managed without Anthea Bell.” Chaired by Thea Lenarduzzi of the TLS.

The unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement, in a 6 x 9-foot cell, twenty-three hours a day, in the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana – all for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived was, in itself, a feat of extraordinary endurance against the violence and deprivation he faced daily. That he was able to emerge whole from his odyssey within America’s prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit. 

Paolo Giordano (Italy) rose to international fame with The Solitude of Prime Numbers, a novel that won the 2008 Strega Prize and which was made into a film in 2010. Author of The Human Body, Giordano was educated as a physicist and will present his recent work, Like Family. In conversation with Héctor Abad Faciolince.