Events - Turning the Political into Fiction
Turning the
Political into Fiction
Chaired by Lucy
Popescu
Waterstones Gower
st, Friday 12 October, 6.30pm
Tickets £8/£6
incls wine
https://www.waterstones.com/events/turning-the-political-into-fiction/london-gower-street
Lucy Popescu presents an evening of readings and
discussion on the subject of turning political events into compelling literature
and, in times of censorship, using fiction to write about political repression with
Héctor Abad, Georgina Harding, Hamid Ismailov and John McGhie.
Héctor Abad
was born in Medellín, Colombia, in 1958, where he studied medicine, philosophy
and journalism. After being expelled from university for writing a defamatory
text against the Pope, he moved to Italy. In 2008, Abad was a guest of the
DAAD‘s Artist-in-Residence Programme in Berlin. He now lives in Colombia. He
will be reading from his bestselling novel, The Farm, about a
Colombian family defending their mountain home against guerrillas and
paramilitaries. It’s been hailed as “today’s literary response to Gabriel
García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of
Solitude.”
Georgina Harding is
the author of five novels: The Gun Room, Painter of Silence, a devastating
portrait of Romania during and after the Second World War (shortlisted for the
2012 Orange Prize), The Solitude of
Thomas Cave, and The Spy Game (a
BBC Book at Bedtime and shortlisted for the Encore Award). Her first book was a
work of non-fiction, In Another Europe,
recording a journey she made across Romania in 1988 during the worst times of
the Ceausescu regime. It was followed by Tranquebar:
A Season in South India, which documented the lives of the people in a
small fishing village in the Coromandel coast. She will be talking and reading
from Painter
of Silence and will give us a sneak preview of her most recent novel, Land
of the Living, which explores the isolation impact of war, loss and
survival and will be published on 1 November.
Hamid Ismailov
is an Uzbek journalist and writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 for
what the state dubbed ‘unacceptable democratic tendencies’. He came to the UK
and works with the BBC World Service. His works are banned in Uzbekistan.
Several of his Russian-original novels have been published in English
translation, including The Railway, The
Dead Lake, long listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Underground. He will be talking
about and reading from The Devils’ Dance the first of his
Uzbek novels to appear in English, described as “a beautiful evocation of different
Central Asian historical worlds.”
John McGhie was
an investigative journalist for the BBC, Channel Four News and the Observer
where he was Political Correspondent. In 2003, he made a BBC documentary White Terror, on which his remarkable debut
novel White Highlands, is partly based. Set in Kenya, it is an
outstanding evocation of colonial imperialism and its aftermath, “full of high
drama, raw emotion and great descriptive power.”