Presented by Laura Turégano, Associate Director, KJCC, and Miguel Albero, Head of Cultural Office, Embassy of Spain. Moderated by Valerie Miles, Guest Editor, Granta, and translator Esther Allen.

Tuesday, October 4, 2022, 7:00 pm KJCC, 53 Washington Square S, New York, NY 10012

Spanish-language literature is experiencing a moment of extraordinary vitality and diversity. Granta’s issue 155 (Spring 2021) assembled 25 of the most exciting writers under thirty-five. Hosted by NYU (KJCC and Creative Writing in Spanish) and the Embassy of Spain, this bi-lingual event gathered five of these writers for a lively evening of conversation and readings. The selection shows that writers and genres once considered peripheral are thriving and renewing the center; science fiction, psychedelia, technology, mysticism, and more. Other writers reach back to tradition: mythology, or Jewish identity in Europe, as a springboard to push ahead and beyond the limits of language and form in exploring new themes, new rhythms, and a whole new attitude.

This event is part of Granta’s tour Building Bridges 2, which started in New York (at NYU and the Brooklyn Book Festival) and continued to Boston, Minneapolis, Dallas, and Houston, ending at the Litquake Festival in San Francisco.

Moderators

Valerie Miles is a writer, editor, translator, and founding editor of Granta en español. Her writing and essays can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Times, El País, The Paris Review, Granta, etc. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for her translation of Cremation by Rafael Chirbes, which has been shortlisted for the inaugural Spain-USA Foundation and ALTA prize, 2022. She curated the first public exhibit of Roberto Bolaño’s papers for the CCCB in Barcelona, Archivo Bolaño, 1977-2003, after working in his archive and editing manuscripts for several years. Her bibliography includes her book A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, and 25 issues of Granta en español. Her recent translations include Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols in NYRB, and work with Azar Nafisi on her book, Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile, for Yale University Press. Her translation of This Too Shall Pass, by Milena Busquets, was a finalist for the Dublin Prize, and won a Pen Translation Award. She teaches Translation and Creative Writing at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

Esther Allen is a writer & translator of, among other works, Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama and The Silentiary, both published by New York Review Books, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on DiBenedetto. She teaches in the newly relaunched translation track of the MA in Liberal Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and at Baruch College, where she runs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program.

Authors

David Aliaga (1989) was born in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, near Barcelona, Spain. He has written about the question of Jewish identity in literature for Avispero, Jewish Renaissance, Mozaika and Quimera. His fiction books include Y no me llamaré más Jacob and El año nuevo de los árboles.

Mateo García Elizondo (1987) was born in Mexico City. He wrote the film Desierto, and has written for magazines such as Nexos and graphic novel scripts for Premier Comics and Entropy Magazine. His first novel, Una cita con la Lady, won the City of Barcelona Award.

Alejandro Morellón (1985) was born in Madrid, Spain. He is the author of La noche en que caemos, which won the 2013 MonteLeón Foundation Award, El estado natural de las cosas, which won the 2017 Gabriel García Márquez Hispano-American Short Story Prize and, most recently, Caballo sea la noche.

Michel Nieva (1988) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is the author of the poetry collection Papelera de reciclaje, the novels ¿Sueñan los gauchoides con ñandúes eléctricos? and Ascenso y apogeo del imperio argentino and the essay collection Tecnología y barbarie.

Irene Reyes-Noguerol (1997) was born in Seville, Spain. She is the recipient of the Tigre Juan YoungWriters’ Award, the Brocense Award and the Camilo José Cela Award. She is the author of two collections of stories, Caleidoscopios and De Homero y otros dioses.

Co-sponsored by NYU King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC), NYU Creative Writing in Spanish Program, the Embassy of Spain in the US and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).