Culture, Thought and the Portuguese Language: A Reading & Conversation with Gonçalo M. Tavares

Gonçalo M. Tavares (born in Luanda, Angola, 1970) is one of the leading writers of contemporary Portuguese literature, and one of the most translated into English after José Saramago and António Lobo Antunes. Among his 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. 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, 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 1998 Nobel Laureate for Literature, 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.” Free and open to the public | Reception and book-signing to follow