PEN World Voices in Rochester [Events!]

In case we haven’t mentioned this before, tonight we’re co-hosting a special event with Writers & Books and PEN World Voices featuring three international authors: Najat El Hachmi, Marcelo Figueras, and Carsten Jensen.

All the info can be found here, but in short, this event starts at 7pm at Writers & Books (740 University Ave.).

What we’re going to do is have each author read for 10-15 minutes from their book, then I’ll ask a few questions, then we’ll move onto the next one. At the end, we’ll have some time for audience (and more general) questions.

I’m really looking forward to this, especially after meeting all three of them and reading bits of all their works. In brief:

Marcelo Figueras is the author of five novels, including Kamchatka, which just came out from Grove and is the story of a 10-year-old boy’s experiences during the Argentine coup of 1976. It’s a tense story, but told through the eyes of a child, it’s also very fun and funny, and overall charming. This was made into a movie in 2002 and was Argentina’s official selection for that year’s Oscars.

Najat El Hachmi was born in Morocco, but moved to Barcelona as a child and writes in Catalan. All of which is naturally fascinating. Can’t wait to hear her take on Catalan literature and the reasons for writing in this language . . . Also, The Last Patriarch just came out from Serpent’s Tail and is worth che cking out.

Carsten Jensen has had a few books published in English, most recently, We, the Drowned which is out from HMH in Charlotte Barslund and Emma Ryder’s translation. K.E. Semmel reviewed this for us, and said that it is “a tour de force, a colossus, that gives Americans an opportunity to witness the gears of a great writer at work, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.”

As is tradition, here’s the piece from this morning’s local news about the event: