March 17, 2008
Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco to give reading on
campus
june.avignone@rochester.edu
Two of the most respected international authors of our
time, Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco, will read from their work and discuss
literature at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 1, in the auditorium at the Alumni and
Advancement Center, 300 East River Rd. The event, which is part of the PEN
World Voices Festival, is hosted by Open Letter, the University’s new
press dedicated to publishing works of literature in translation. The
event is free and open to the public.
“To have these two great writers together on one
stage is a rare and special event,” says Chad Post, director of Open
Letter. “This is a wonderful opportunity for everyone in upstate New
York.”
Salman Rushdie
Rushdie shot onto the literary scene in 1981 with the
publication of Midnight’s Children, a novel about 1,000 gifted children who were born at
midnight, Aug. 15, 1947, when India and Pakistan gained independence from
Great Britain. The novel won the Booker Prize for that year, and then was
selected in 1993 as the best novel to win the Booker Prize in the past 25
years. Rushdie is also the author of The
Satanic Verses, Shame, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and
the forthcoming The Enchantress of
Florence.
Best known for The
Name of the Rose, which has sold over 26
million copies worldwide, Eco is considered to be one of the greatest
Italian writers of the 20th century. His novel Foucault’s Pendulum was
praised by the New York Times as an “intellectual triumph” upon its
release, and his other major works of fiction—including Baudolino and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana—received great critical praise. He also has published
numerous works of nonfiction, including Travels
in Hyperreality, A Theory of Semiotics, Experiences in Translation,
On Literature,
and, most recently, On Ugliness and Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media
Populism.
Umberto Eco
The Rochester program is one of the many events in the
PEN World Voices Festival, an annual weeklong event in New York City that
brings together more than 100 writers from around the world for a series of
readings, panel discussions, and other events—all in celebration of
international literature. “It’s very exciting for the PEN World
Voices Festival of International Literature to be working with Open
Letter to bring two of the world’s most important literary figures to
audiences in Rochester,” says Caro Llewellyn, director of the PEN
World Voices Festival.
The event is free, but tickets are required. Ticket
information can be found at http://events.openletterbooks.com/events/new. For further information,
contact Erica Strawbridge at the Conference and Events Office at
275-4111, erica.strawbridge@rochester.edu.
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