Lusophone Voices: A Reading & Conversation with José Eduardo Agualusa

Join us for a reading and conversation with José Eduardo Agualusa [Alves da Cunha] and Linda Heywood. Agualusa will read from and discuss his book, A General Theory of Oblivion (Archipelago Books, December, 2015).

On the eve of Angolan independence, an agoraphobic woman named Ludo bricks herself into her Luandan apartment for 30 years, living off vegetables and the pigeons she lures in with diamonds, burning her furniture and books to stay alive and writing her story on the apartment’s walls. Almost as if we’re eavesdropping, the history of Angola unfolds through the stories of those she sees from her window.

José Eduardo Agualusa was born in 1960 in Huambo, Angola. He studied agronomy and forestry in Lisbon before starting his writing career as a poet. His novel Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, and he recently received the U.K.’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the U.K. for The Book of Chameleons. He lives in Luanda and Lisbon.

Linda Heywood is a professor of African History and the History of the African Diaspora and African American Studies at Boston University. She is the author of Contested Power in Angola, editor of and contributor to Central Africans Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, and co-author with John Thornton of Central African, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of America (Cambridge University Press, July, 2007) which was the winner of the 2008 Melville Herskovits Award for the Best Book published in African Studies.

This year's European Voices events are organized in collaboration with the literary journal AGNI 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. José Eduardo Agualusa's visit is co-sponsored by the African Studies Center at Boston University and UMASS Lowell.

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