Two Booker-shortlisted novelists, foremost Mediterranean scholar to address the Mediterranean Fractures symposium
Writers Hisham Matar (US) and Abdulrazak Gurnah (UK), both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and recipients of numerous international literary accolades, will be delivering the keynote speeches at the forthcoming Mediterranean Fractures international symposium, hosted by the Mediterranean Institute of the University of Malta. They will be joined by foremost writer, cultural critic, ethnographer and documentary film-maker Stephanos Stephanides (Cyprus), widely recognised as one of the leading poets and scholars of the Mediterranean region, as keynote speaker. Mr Matar will also be giving an open public lecture during his stay in Malta. Earlier this year, he will be participating in the 2015 edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival organised by Inizjamed.
Hisham Matar Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo.
His first novel, In the Country of Men (2006), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian's First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It won six international literary awards including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book award, the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize, and the inaugural Arab American Book Award. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), was shortlisted for the Encore Award, The Arab American Book Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast, The Independent, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Toronto Sun, and the Irish Times. His novels have been translated to twenty-eight languages.
In 2013 Matar received the Blue Metropolis Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Arab Literary Prize, awarded for a substantial literary achievement by an Arab author working in any genre and in any language. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Weiss International Fellow in Literature and the Arts and Adjunct Associate Professor in the English Department at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Stephanos Stephanides was born in Trikomo, Cyprus. He left the island as a child and lived in several countries for more than thirty years before returning to Cyprus in 1992 to join the founding faculty of the University of Cyprus where he is Professor of English and Comparative Literature.
He is a poet, essayist, translator, cultural critic and documentary film maker. His work has focussed largely on the Mediterranean, India, and the Caribbean. He is fluent in English, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese. English is his dominant and literary language, but other languages reverberate in his writing.
Selections of his poetry have been published in more than twelve languages, and he has held residential writing and research fellowships in the UK, US, Italy, India, and Greece. He has served as a judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Europe and South Asia region) in 2000 and 2010.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is Professor and Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Research at the University of Kent (UK).
His novel Paradise (1994) was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize. Another of his novels, By the Sea (2001), was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His other novels are The Last Gift (2011), Desertion (2005), Admiring Silence (1996), Dottie (1990), Pilgrims Way (1988) and Memory of Departure (1987). He is the editor of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Essays on African Writing (Heinemann, 1995).
Professor Gurnah has also participated at the 2014 edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, organised by cultural NGO Inizjamed.
The Mediterranean Fractures symposium will takes place at the University of Malta Valletta Campus on 5 and 6 November 2015. It is hosted by the Mediterranean Institute of the University of Malta in collaboration with the Centre for Postcolonial Research, University of Kent and the Associazione Italiana di Studi sulle Culture e Letterature di Lingua Inglese (AISCLI).
The Mediterranean Fractures symposium is organised with the support of the Ministry for Education and Employment.
Registration for Mediterranean Fractures is now open. The registration form, together with more information and details on the symposium, are available online.
For further information contact the symposium convenor, Dr Norbert Bugeja.