Melbourne Writers Festival 2013
Friday 23 August 3:30pm AEST
Should Literature Be Political?
Keynote: Amanda Lohrey (read by Alison Croggon) joined by Junot Diaz
Chair: Jeremy Harding
Author Biographies:
Amanda Lohrey‘s first novel was The Morality of Gentlemen, published in 1984. It was followed by The Reading Group and then Camille’s Bread, winner of the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 1996. Her most recent novel is The Philosopher’s Doll (2004) which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is the author of the novella Vertigo (2008) and of the short story collection Reading Madame Bovary (2010) which won the Fiction Prize and the Steele Rudd Short Story Award in the 2011 Queensland Literary Awards.
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.