BIBLIOTOPIA literary week-end around the world | Inaugural Evening Programme
Inaugural evening
PROGRAMME
6.30pm Oya Baydar and Juan Gabriel Vásquez in conversation
Dark Corners of History
Moderation: Oriane Jeancourt Galignani, writer and
editor at Transfuge magazineIn French
With signing
7.45pm Tribute to Amos Oz by Claude Thébert
8.30pm Cocktail
Rates and Reservations
CHF 10.- | Reservation at vendredi-bibliotopia@fondation-janmichalski.ch
The authors
Oya Baydar
Oya Baydar is a Turkish novelist and political activist, born in 1940. She was exiled from Turkey after the military coup of 1980 and lived in Germany. She wrote about the period of reunification in her award-winning collection of essays Farewell Alyosha (1991). She returned to Turkey in 1992. She has written six novels and won multiple awards, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Her novel, The Lost Word, published in English in 2011, deals with the Kurdish conflict. Since 2013 she has been writing for the online newspaper T24, particularly about Kurdish issues. Oya Baydar currently lives in Turkey, dividing her time between Istanbul and the Marmara Island.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in 1973 in Bogotá in Colombia where he studied law at the University of Rosario. After graduating, he left for France where he studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. His books include the award-winning The Informers (2008), The Secret History of Costaguana (2011, Qwerty Prize and Fundación Libros y Letras Prize), as well as The Sound of Things Falling (2013, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), The Shape of the Ruins (2018), and the story collection Lovers on All Saints’ Day (2015). His new novel Canciones para el incendio has just been released in Spanish. Published in twenty-eight languages, Vásquez’s books often confront the past of Colombia to understand the present. He has translated the works of E.M. Forster, Victor Hugo and John Hersey, among others, and his articles appear regularly both in Spanish and Latin American publications. After sixteen years in France, Belgium, and Spain, he now lives in Bogotá.
See also
BIBLIOTOPIA | Saturday 18 May Programme
BIBLIOTOPIA | Sunday 19 May Programme