Evento

Héctor Abad Faciolince in conversation with Juan M. Martínez

Thursday, September 20, 6 pm
Instituto Cervantes
31 West Ohio St.
Chicago, IL 60654
In Spanish with comments in English
FREE and open to the public. Reservations are required

For more information please visit http://chicago.cervantes.es
http://www.hectorabad.com/biografia/

Héctor Abad is one of Colombias leading writers. Born in 1958, he grew up in Medellín, where he studied medicine, philosophy and journalism. In 1987, his father was murdered by Colombian paramilitaries, an event he reflected on 20 years later in Oblivion: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), which earned widespread critical acclaim as well as the WOLA-Duke Book Award. After being expelled from university for writing a defamatory text against the Pope, he moved to Italy before returning to his homeland in 1987. Abad has worked as a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Verona and as a translator of Italian literature. His translations from the Italian include works by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Umberto Eco. Abad writes a weekly column for Colombias national newspaper El Espectador. The Farm won the 2015 Cálamo Prize in Spain and was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize.

Juan Martínez (PhD, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2011) is a fiction writer. He was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and has since lived in Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada. His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney's, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, Norton's Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America, and The Perpetual Engine of Hope: Stories Inspired by Iconic Vegas Photographs. Best Worst American, his story collection, will be coming out from Small Beer Press in February 2017.