Event Details

...a joint venture with Lancaster LitFest and the Department of European Languages & Cultures https://litfest.org/festival2021/the-lancaster-international-fiction-lecture-juan-gabriel-vasquez/

‘Juan Gabriel Vásquez . . . has succeeded García Márquez as the literary grandmaster of Colombia’ – Ariel Dorfman, New York Review of Books

‘A masterful writer’ – Nicole Krauss

Juan Gabriel Vásquez grew up in the Colombian capital of Bogotá in the shadow of Gabriel García Márquez, the long guerrilla war that has not yet ended, and the shadow of Pablo Escobar and the narcotraficantes. How do you escape that first shadow of the most influential writer in your country, not to mention for a time the world, to write fiction about your own reality and take on and make imaginative sense of those other shadows of violence and corruption? This is the challenge that Vásquez has accepted both in his fiction and in his journalism, and which he will discuss in this first Lancaster International Fiction Lecture.