The City and the Writer

A celebration of multicultural, multilingual authorship; a diverse lineup of award-winning writers come together to celebrate and share their writing. The evening is inspired by the column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine, the most important international literature magazine in the United States, noted for its ruminations on urban life and the imagination, literature and language, translation and transitions. This kind of loosely structured format and the range and quality of the contributors should make for a really interesting evening.

The curator is NYU Abu Dhabi’s Nathalie Handal (USA-France), award-winning poet and author of ten books.

The contributors:

Alain Mabanckou (Congo-France-USA) Novelist, poet, essayist, and a professor at UCLA. He is a recipient of the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire.

Amanda Michalopoulo (Greece) Author of eight novels, three short story collections, a play and a novella. Her awards include the Academy of Athens Prize.

Carlo Lucarelli (Italy) Best-selling novelist (more than 20 titles to his name), scriptwriter and television presenter

Angie Cruz (Dominica-USA) Novelist and editor, recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies, winner of the Gold Medal Latino Book Award, and Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Rana Kazkaz (Syria-USA) Award-winning filmmaker with a focus on Syrian stories. Associate Professor at Northwestern University Qatar.

David Henry Hwang (USA) Tony Award winning playwright, TV producer and showrunner. He also co-wrote ‘Solo” with Prince.

Isabella Hammad (UK) Novelist – last year she was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list of the most significant British writers under 40. She has taught literature and creative writing at NYU, Brown and Al Quds Bard College.

Fernanda Trías (Uruguay) Novelist, whose most recent book received Uruguay’s National Literature and Bartolomé Hidalgo prizes and Mexico’s international Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize.

Shahad Al-Rawi (Iraq) Novelist and anthropologist. Her first novel was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award; her second was nominated for the Sheikh Zayed Award.

Wole Soyinka (Nigeria) A towering figure in world literature: Nobel Prize Laureate, artist-dramatist, poet, essayist, musician, philosopher, academic, teacher, human rights activist, global artist, and scholar.

Rachel Holmes (UK) Award-winning biographer, editor, academic, UK Chair of the Iraq Literature Festival in Erbil, and Visiting Literary Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford.