When your life experiences give you both insider cred and outsider status, what kind of perspective do you bring to the page? Get the skinny from two expat writers who are straddling countries and cultures while writing about their own participation in the story.
Masters of the character-driven novel, Colum McCann and Assaf Gavron, compare notes on telling a single story through diverse voices and harnessing the idiosyncrasies of multiple characters - each with their own agendas, neuroses, and destiny - into a seamless tale.
On the streets of Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and beyond, poems are being used as rallying cries for revolution while social media have become the vehicles for delivering them. Daniyal Mueenuddin and Reza Aslan give voice to literature mirroring the ills of society and poets transforming into journalists, historians, and cultural critics.
For all the attention they receive, the cultures of the Middle East seem to resist understanding in the West. In an interview with Rob Spillman, poet Peter Cole discusses the place of translation and poetry in that charged context.
Presented by the Aspen Writers Foundation
Alter Egos is presented by the Aspen Writers Foundation for Aspen Summer Words 2011.
In the tradition of doctor-poet William Carlos Williams, two authors who have hyphenated their time between writing and another fully engaged profession (in this case, artist Rabih Alameddine and farmer Daniyal Mueenuddin) discuss what it means to have a creative and professional alter ego.
Presented by the Aspen Writers Foundation for Aspen Summer Words 2011, this afternoon of on-stage chemistry features friends Khaled Hosseini and Firoozeh Dumas sharing the backstories of their lives: who they were before they became writers and how their paths, from Afghanistan and Iran, respectively, led them to this very moment.
This year’s festival will celebrate the magical literature of the modern Middle East. Against the backdrop of ancient lands where paper was born and poetry has flourished since days of yore, the rich sweep of storytelling continues in today’s novels, memoir, and narrative journalism.
