Since the first edition, we have been trying to feature Zadie Smith at our festival. Finally, the British author will be one of the main protagonists of this year’s 2024 programme.
Zadie Smith (London, 1975), made her debut at the age of twenty-two with her first novel, ‘White Teeth’, followed by a well-known literary work made up of short stories (‘Grand Union’), novels (‘On Beauty’ ,’NW’) and essays (‘Intimations’, ‘Feel Free’).
Her usual Spanish publishing house, Salamandra, will release Zadie Smith’s latest novel, ‘The Fraud’, next October. This novel tackles the historical genre for the first time. The British author’s swing partner at the festival will be the writer and cultural journalist Aloma Rodríguez, who will be in charge of interviewing her in front of the audience.
Despite his early death at the age of forty, Franz Kafka’s (1883-1924) biography is an important contribution to and inseparable from his work. Proof of this are the hundreds of letters he wrote or his life correspondences, which contain diverse symbolic elements, such as the difficulty of ingesting food at an advanced stage of his illness and the professional fasting in ‘A Hunger Artist’.
Reiner Stach (Rochlitz, Saxony, 1951) devoted a decade to writing a monumental biography of Kafka (about two thousands pages), considered the final biography of the Czech author.
Reiner Stach has written countless times about the «Kafkaesque sense of comedy», which he considers an essential aspect of the Czech author. Reiner Stach will be interviewed by writer and translator Berta Vias Mahou to discuss this and other insights into Kafka’s life and work.