On 16 October, Alain Mabanckou will be a guest at the Department of Romance Studies as part of the Transnational Graz Literature Days World Word Traveller, in conversation with Andrea Renker and Verena Richter. Alexandra Marics will provide the translation. Admission is free and open to the public.
About the author
Alain Mabanckou (*1966 in Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo), poet, novelist and essayist, is one of the most important voices in contemporary French-language literature. After studying law in Brazzaville, Nantes and Paris, he initially worked as a lawyer before devoting himself entirely to literature and writing. He became internationally recognised with award-winning novels such as Broken Glass (Verre cassé, 2005), Porcupine Memoirs (Mémoires de porc-épic, 2006) and Black Bazar (2009). He lives in the USA, where he teaches as a professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Talk and reading
With verve, the texts of Alain Mabanckou, world traveller and connoisseur of literatures, traverse a transcontinental interspace in which meanings shift where political boundaries remain elsewhere. Deeply rooted in the narrative traditions of his native country, Mabanckou's novels reach beyond the local where they combine a response to the colonial gaze with an ironic and humorous blending of global cultural traditions.
In doing so, the author overwrites established patterns and narratives and stretches the boundaries of conventional novel grammar, for example when narratives consist of a single sentence and he incorporates intertextual traces of literatures from all over the world into his stories in postmodern density, without disturbing the immediate pleasure of reading them. In this way, Mabanckou opens up imaginary spaces in which literatures and cultures are arranged horizontally and in which narrative voices and forms experience a transnational equality.