Conversations with Spanish Author Andrés Neuman (04/23/14 – 04/24/14)
Join us for two upcoming events with Spanish writer Andrés Neuman. On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 23, Neuman will take part in a seminar with the poet, scholar, and writer Gustavo Guerrero. The seminar, which will be conducted in Spanish, is geared to graduate students and faculty. On the evening of Thursday, April 24, he will give a public reading to be followed by a conversation with Alicia Borinsky. Please see details below!
Neuman, who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1977, the son of emigrant musicians, is widely regarded as one of the best young Spanish-language novelists. He is also an accomplished writer of short stories, an essayist, a poet, and a translator. He has a degree in Spanish philology from the University of Granada, where he worked as a teacher of Latin American literature.
In 1999, at the age of 22, Neuman published his first novel, Bariloche (Anagrama, 1999), a First Finalist for the prestigious Herralde Prize and one of the top ten of the year according to the literary supplement of El Mundo. His following novels were La vida en las ventanas (Espasa, 2002) and autobiographical Una vez Argentina (Anagrama, 2003), also a First Finalist for the Herralde Prize. His fourth novel, El viajero del siglo (Alfaguara, 2009; published in the the USA as Traveler of the Century, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), won the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, awarded by the Spanish Literary Critics Association. It was also selected among the books of the year by the critics of El País, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Independent, Financial Times, and by the Dutch newspapers NRC Handelsblad and De Volkskrant. This novel was later short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Latino Book Award, the Rómulo Gallegos Prize (given to the best Spanish-language novel published during the two previous years), and also long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. His most recent novel is Hablar solos (Talking to Ourselves, Alfaguara, 2012, to be published in English in April 2014), one of the best books of the year according to La Vanguardia.
The late Robert Bolaño had the following praise of Neuman in his essay collection, Between Parentheses:
Neuman has a gift. No good reader will fail to perceive in its pages something that can only be found in literature of the highest rank, the kind written by true poets who dare to penetrate into the darkness with their eyes open, and who keep them open no matter what. When I encounter these young writers it makes me want to cry. The literature of the 21st century will belong to Neuman and to a handful of his blood brothers.
This event takes place as part of our European Voices series—an ongoing series of conversations with artists and writers, activists and intellectuals exploring questions at the intersection of politics and culture. Cosponsored by the literary journal AGNI and the Department of Romance Studies at Boston University. Funded in part by the European Commission Delegation in Washington, DC.
