Critically acclaimed Portuguese author Gonçalo M. Tavares to tour US and Canada in late April early May 2015
Invited by the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) and the Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture and Research at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Gonçalo M. Tavares (born in Luanda, Angola, 1970), one of the leading writers of contemporary Portuguese literature and the most translated after José Saramago and António Lobo Antunes, will give a series of lectures in the US and Canada in late April and early May 2015. On April 29 he will be at Boston University’s Center for the Study of Europe; on April 30 he will give a talk at UMass Lowell’s Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture and the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities, on May 1 he will speak at Rochester University’s Open Letter Books. His visit will conclude with a keynote address on May 2 at the Annual Conference of the Northeast Modern Language Association. Among Tavares’s most celebrated novels are Jerusalem, Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique, and A Man: Klaus Klump. He has been published in over 35 countries, including in the US by Dalkey Archive Press and Texas Tech University Press.
Tavares, who teaches philosophy at the University of Lisbon, has been awarded a series of prestigious national and international prizes, including the 2005 José Saramago Prize and the 2010 Prize for Best Foreign Book (France), and was on the long list for the Best Translated Book Award in Fiction for 2013. According to the New Yorker, Tavares “has a gift—like Flann O’Brien or Kafka or Beckett—for revealing the ways in which logic can be as faithful a servant of madness as of reason…. His books may be bleak and unnerving, but they are, for this reason, exhilarating in the way that only the work of a powerfully original artist can be.” Saramago, the Nobel Laureate for 2008, intoned that “Tavares burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with an utterly original imagination that broke through all the traditional imaginative boundaries. I’ve predicted that in thirty years’ time, if not before, he will win the Nobel Prize.” For The Independent, Tavares’s works of fiction are “daring, thought-provoking and brilliant.”
For more information, contact Maria Matz, Spanish and Portuguese Coordinator for NeMLA, at maria_matz@uml.edu or Frank F. Sousa, director, Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture and Research, at frank_sousa@uml.edu.