A Reading and Conversation with Attila Bartis and Clemens Meyer

Hosted by Center for International Relations and AGNI

Novelists Attila Bartis and Clemens Meyer read in their native tongues and answer questions about family, history, and literary influences. Bartis, who is Romanian-Hungarian, reads from Tranquility, his first novel to appear in English, about a 36-year-old writer who shares a small apartment with his formerly famous mother. German writer Meyer offers an excerpt from When We Were Dreaming, his tale of working-class kids trying to find place in Leipzig after fall of the Berlin Wall.

Bartis talks about his family and upbringing in Romania and Hungary, as well as relations between the two countries, “Before 1990, Hungarians saw Transylvanians as some kind of zoo animals,” he recalls.

Meyer discusses literature in wartime Germany, when, he says, “People were reading because it was a window out of the country . . . Writers found a special way to criticize the government, between the lines. People wanted to see how they beat the censors.”

Bill Pierce, senior editor at the literary magazine AGNI, reads passages from both novels in English, and Askold Melnyczuk, author of The House of Widows, moderates the talk.

The event was funded by the European Commission Delegation in Washington, DC; co-sponsored by the Center for International Relations at Boston University and AGNI; and presented in cooperation with the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and Zephyr Press.

April 7, 2009, 6:30 p.m.
Photonics Center

Video length is 01:55:22.

About the speaker:
Attila Bartis was born in Targu Mures, Romania, and lives in Hungary. He has been hailed as one of the most highly inventive central European literary mavericks writing today. After completing a degree in photography, Bartis published his first novel, A Séta, in 1995 along with a collection of short stories. He was awarded the Tibor Déry Prize and the Sandor Márai Prize in 2001 for Tranquility (Graywolf, 2009), his first novel to appear in English.

Clemens Meyer was born in Halle/Saale in 1977 and lives in Leipzig. He started his working life as a builder, furniture mover, and security guard, before studying at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut, in Leipzig. His first novel, Als wir träumten (While We Were Dreaming), was published in 2006 and won several prizes. For his collection of short stories, Die Nacht, die Lichter (The Night, the Lights) (Fischer Verlag, 2008), he received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2008.

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