This talk will discuss writing in confinement and, more generally, about what happens to our imagination and capacity for creativity during socio-political crises? Do circumstances like wars, authoritarianism, exile or different forms of confinement ignite or stifle our creative drive? Can we work, think and imagine when we are living in fear and under threat?
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, and Tell Me How It Ends (An Essay in Forty Questions). Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive was an international critical and commercial success. It was a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019, won the Rathbone Folio Prize 2020, the Dublin Award 2021, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Booker Prize 2019 among others. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for “challenging conventional notions of authorship in fiction, essays, and inventive hybrids of the two that pose profound questions about the various ways we piece together stories and document the lives of others.” Her work is published in more than thirty languages. She is a professor at Bard College.
This event is colloquium credit eligible.