European Voices: A Reading & Conversation with Ilija Trojanow

Join us for a reading and conversation with Bulgarian-German author Ilija Trojanow. Trojanow will read from The Lamentations of Zeno (Verso Books, 2016), a literary fiction about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic.

Trojanow, born in Bulgaria in 1965 and brought up in East Africa, established his name as an international writer with the novel Der Weltensammler or The Collector of Worlds (2006), about the cross-cultural Victorian adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton. Since the mid-1990s Trojanow has been prolific in a number of genres, including travel, ethnography and science fiction. He has also become a major public intellectual in Austria and Germany with provocative interventions on topics such as Islam and the West, civil rights in the age of cyber-surveillance and climate change. His imaginative writing sits at the centre of a number of defining contemporary concerns, in particular the relationship between identity, language and culture.

Trojanow is the author of more than 20 books, including Angriff auf die Freiheit (Attack on Freedom), a polemic on surveillance that he co-wrote with fellow writer Juli Zeh and published in 2009. In July, he and Zeh penned an open letter calling on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to respond to the NSA’s surveillance program. - See more at: http://www.pen.org/press-release/2013/11/08/third-attempt-pen-member-ilija-trojanow-permitted-us#sthash.CGMLZ0lk.dpuf

This year's European Voices events are organized in collaboration with the literary journal AGNI and the Goethe-Institut Boston and are taking place as part of EU Futures, a series of conversations exploring the emerging future in Europe. The EU Futures project is supported by a Getting to Know Europe Grant from the European Commission Delegation in Washington, DC to the Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University.

Free and open to the public. Reception and book-signing to follow.