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ENGLISH LANGUAGE EVENTLITERATURE SAMPLES IN FINNISH AND SPANISH
Description :
From urbanite musings to the wilderness of crime and revolt, from the hyperrealist to the magical, from the radically local to the snares of globalized spectacle, Latin American contemporary fiction encompasses several currents that answer to its manifold reality. Filtered by the Anglo-American culture industry, this wealth of voices is represented in Finland mainly by those books that immediately answer to one of two escapist strategies: Latin America as a dystopia or as a place for pastoral romance and intrigue.
Helsinki-based fiction writer Sergio Augusto Sánchez (born in Colombia, 1984) represents one of the strongest and (paradoxically) less exported currents of Latin American literature: what scholars have come to call the poetics of disenchantment. Less outrageous than the representation of massacre and depravity, but more grounded in social reality than self-fiction (often centered in the writer’s inability to achieve inner peace), the poetics of disenchantment is a state of mind and an aesthetic current. It results form a milieu where the future has vanished, but the final cataclysm has not yet arrived. Spurred by ambiguous, often harmful desires, the protagonists of disenchantment wander about in the maze of thwarted social and economic structures. They are lost but awake. They are attentive but ill-informed. What ensues is a parade of failures and surprises, an eternal prison break, the longing for a sunny beach that’s out of bounds.
In this conversation with poet and translator José Luis Rico, Sergio Augusto Sánchez will discuss the place of his own fiction in the Latin American literary panorama and offer an overview of other authors that can be ascribed to his poetic genealogy.
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Sergio Augusto Sánchez (Bucaramanga, Colombia, 1984). Fiction writer, Master of Creative Writing from the National University of Colombia. Sánchez writes short stories, novels, poetry, film scripts, and non-fiction books. He has published two collections: Lluvia sobre el asfalto (2017) and Animales de otros caminos (2022), as well as an illustrated children’s book La historia Verde (2021). His book has also been translated and published in Finnish by Aviador Oy. In addition, his writings have been published in newspapers and magazines in Colombia, Mexico and England. Sergio currently lives in Helsinki.
Thanks to Kone Foundation for sponsoring this even and Sivuvalo's New Havens & Humanoids project for the years 2023-3024.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Stadin yhteisötalo Oulunkylän Seurahuone, Larin Kyöstin tie 7, FI-00650 Helsinki, Suomi,Helsinki, Finland