Literary matinée: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
in conversation about his novel The Most Secret Memory of Man (Prix Goncourt 2021)
with Andrea Renker, Pankhuri Bhatt and Helena Sawilla (Romance Studies at the University of Graz)
on Friday, 18.10.2024 at 11:00 am
in the Wall Library, Merangasse 70, 8010 Graz
Admission free
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's novels were written between Africa and Europe, between Senegal and France. He describes literature as a third continent, by which he means a free space in which history is written differently and voices are given new weight. His novel The Most Secret Memory of Man (Prix Goncourt 2021) is a labyrinthine odyssey. It tells the story of the search for a writer who left Senegal in the 1930s with one hope. What he leaves behind is an explosive book and a mysterious trail.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's novel is a mosaic of memory fragments: Diary entries, letters, narratives within narratives, pieced together by the irony of fate and the author - funny, tragic, terrible, gentle. What is man's most secret memory? And is the Western canon the curse of their repression or a possible language for their transmission?
In cooperation with the transnational literary festival Weltwortreisende, we have a special opportunity to talk to the author. Admission is free and barrier-free. Alexandra Marics will provide the translation.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is a philosopher, literary scholar and multi-award-winning author of the novels Terre ceinte (2015), Silence du choeur (2017), De purs hommes (2018). La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (2021) was published in German in 2022 under the title Die geheimste Erinnerung der Menschen . His novels are available in the university library.
Pankhuri Bhatt has been a university assistant for literary and cultural studies at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Graz since 2022. She is doing her doctorate on the ecopoetics of the Indian pilgrimage in French literature.
Andrea Renker is a literary scholar and university assistant at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Graz, specializing in rhetoric and discourse analysis. Her dissertation in Latin philology on the bucolic letters of Dante Alighieri was published in 2021.
Helena Sawilla is a student of French literature at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Graz and a prospective teacher of French, religion and ethics.