Rodrigo Rey Rosa in conversation with Merve Emre (Wesleyan University) and Rachel Nolan (Boston University).
Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa is one of the most celebrated novelists writing in the Spanish language today. In his work, he regularly explores the desaparecidos of Latin America, the treatment of the Mayan people, the archives of police violence, the structures that enable dictatorships, surveillance and secrecy, the threatening presence and afterlives of military figures and forces in everyday and public life.
Rey Rosa has published some fourteen novels and another ten books of short stories, essays, and poetry. His work has been translated in fifteen languages—books in English include The Pelcari Project, The Good Cripple, The African Shore, Human Matter, Chaos: A Fable, and The Country of Toó (2023). Rey Rosa is the literary executor of Paul Bowles, and has been awarded Guatemala’s national literature prize, China’s Best Foreign Book Award, and the prestigious José Donoso Prize in Chile. He is, Roberto Bolaño once noted, "the most rigorous writer of my generation, the most transparent, the one that knows best how to weave his stories, and the most luminous of all."
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg University Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing at Wesleyan University; she writes regularly for The New Yorker and other publications, and is the author of The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2018) and Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017).
Rachel Nolan is a Contributing Editor at Harper’s Magazine, an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University, and the author of Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, forthcoming in 2023 from Harvard University Press.
Event begins at 5pm
Evening reception to follow
Write remarque.institute@nyu.edu to attend in person, or join us via Zoom. Advance registration is strictly required.
This event is sponsored by the Remarque Institute, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and NYU Arts & Science Creative Writing Program.