A Reading & Conversation with Colombian writer Héctor Abad

Join Archipelago Books and Boston University on September 17 as Héctor Abad reads from his masterwork The Farm, in a luminous new translation by Anne McLean. Discover the novel that Colombia's El Espectador called "a universal work that explores the attachments that enslave human beings, who, to preserve them, are willing to risk everything.”

Pilar, Eva, and Antonio Ángel are the last heirs of La Oculta, a farm hidden in the mountains of Colombia. The land provides the setting for the siblings’ happiest memories, but it also reminds them of their struggle against the siege of violence and terror, restlessness and flight. In The Farm, Héctor Abad illuminates the vicissitudes of a family and a people, as well as the voices of these three siblings, recounting their loves, fears, desires, and hopes, all against a dazzling backdrop. We enter their lives at the moment they are about to lose the paradise on which they built their dreams and reality.

Héctor Abad is one of Colombia’s leading writers. In 1987, his father was murdered by Colombian paramilitaries, an event he reflected on 20 years later in Oblivion: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), which earned widespread critical acclaim as well as the WOLA-Duke Book Award. His translations from the Italian include works by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Umberto Eco. Abad writes a weekly column for Colombia’s national newspaper El Espectador. The Farm won the 2015 Cálamo Prize in Spain and was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize.

A reception precedes the talk from 5 to 6 PM.