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 renowned US writer and journalist David Rieff, author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (2003), Against Remembrance (2012) and Swimming in a Sea of Death, in which he deals with the loss of his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, presents his new book, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. In this work he reflects on historical memory and the voluntary option of forgetting with regard to traumatic historical events, questioning the ethical obligation to remember as the individual’s responsibility. In conversation with Jaime Abello Banfi.

El fin de la oscuridad. El ocaso de la noche en una era de luz artificial es un libro de divulgación científica en el que Paul Bogard reflexiona sobre temas de ecología y urbanismo. A medio camino entre la memoria personal, el diario de viaje y la observación científica de la naturaleza, esta obra es un llamado a la defensa de la noche como uno de los ámbitos naturales que debemos preservar. Bogard es profesor de literatura de no ficción en la Universidad James Madison, Virginia, y editor de la antología Let There Be Light: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark. Patrocinado por Tito Pabón
Con el apoyo de la Embajada de Estados Unidos de América

El escritor chileno Carlos Franz ha sido el ganador de la II Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa por su novela Si te vieras con mis ojos, novela que describe un triángulo amoroso en Chile a finales del siglo XIX, con unos protagonistas muy particulares basados en personajes reales. Franz es autor de otras tres novelas, libros de ensayo y cuento, y es miembro de la Academia Chilena de la Lengua. Por su parte, el escritor y periodista Gastón García Marinozzi (Argentina) ha sacado a la luz su primera novela, Viaje al fin de la memoria, un peculiar road trip protagonizado por periodistas dedicados a la investigación. En conversación con el escritor y crítico literario Pablo Duarte.

Dermot McMonagle is a Cavan-based historian and the author of 29 Main Street: Living With Partition, an account of the rise of Sinn Fein from 1917.

Venture capitalist, ex Google, Facebook, and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Scott Hartley the author of the bestseller “The Fuzzy & the Techie” is a strong believer in the human skills necessary in a digital world; Enrique Dans, professor, influencer, blogger and digital transformation expert studies the effects of technology on people, businesses and society. They talk to Marta Garcia Aller, journalist, professor and Spanish writer, author of the recent book “El fin del mundo tal y como lo conocemos”.

The acclaimed science writer uses chicken as the lens for examining everything that has gone wrong in the modern agricultural system: overuse of antibiotics, threats to the environment, violations of animal welfare, destruction of farm economies and rural civic structure, disruption of international trade and delivery of over-processed, obesity-promoting, nutritionally hollow food. McKenna takes us from vast poultry farms to laboratories, kitchens and street-food markets around the world, revealing how economic, political and cultural forces converged to make our favourite meat a hidden danger. Boycott is chair of the London Food Board.

Join spectacular storyteller Atinuke for a bouncy read-along with Baby and his mama. Hear all about the traditional folk tales and the stories from the bustling city in Nigeria where she grew up and which inspired her writing.

Directed by Neasa Ní Chianáín. Duration 80 minutes.

A riveting and haunting documentary about Neal McGregor, a 44-year-old English artist who died in the stone shed where he lived on the small Donegal island of Inisbofin. He left behind only volumes of secret diaries and animal carvings. The Irish-speaking islanders knew little of Neal during the eight years he lived there. This is a documentary about memory and perception, a journey to capture an unusual portrait of a man, living on the edge, both physically and mentally, and the insular Irish-speaking island community he lived among. Followed by a Q&A with director Neasa Ní Chianáin.