Rodrigo Hasbún
(Cochabamba, 1981) is a Bolivian writer considered a major talent in Latin American literature. Hasbun's international breakthrough came in 2015 with his second novel Los afectos, which won him a PEN Award. In 2016 the novel appeared in Dutch translation with the title Woeste jaren (Savage Years). It's a gripping story partly based on fact about an eccentric nazi family living in Bolivia in the fifties and sixties. Before he started writing, Hasbun was a guitarist in a grunge band; he says that music taught him the importance of rhythm to a good book. He debuted in 2006 with the story collection Cinco, an immediate smash success. One of its stories was made into a film and another reworked for the theatre.
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Archive available for: Rodrigo Hasbún
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The Book of My Life: Rodrigo Hasbún
Rodrigo Hasbún talks about his favourite book - the book that inspires or moves him; the book that formed his moral or intellectual compass; the book that he would recommend to anyone. Interviewer: Hassnae Bouazza. In English.
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Ideology as an Act of Fiction
Writers are more likely to take up the pen than the sword in order to fight injustice. Fiction becomes their ideological act. In The Underground Railway, the American Colson Whitehead gives a voice to Cora the slave in the so-called land of the free. Bolivian Rodrigo Hasbún writes about the daughter of a Nazi who becomes a guerrilla fighter in South America. Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu's characters groan under the communist yoke and escape into literature and the past, while Dutch writer Carolina Trujillo describes an underworld of drugs and dealers in Montevideo, Uruguay, where a former guerrilla was president until 2015. Moderator: Judith Uyterlinde.
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My Secret City
Can the secrets of a city a collection of microcosms, a collection of past and layered histories ever be completely and commonly uncovered? The festival asked seven authors to write about their own "secret" cities. Not the city that they see when they walk out the door and onto the street, but the city that they occasionally and unexpectedly come across. Participants read in their own language, with English and Dutch translations projected simultaneously.
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This Is Not America (part 1)
A late-night show about the United States of America that touches on many issues, from the shrinking middle class to the differences between whites and blacks, from hopeful new immigrants to the embittered white underclass. The America of the supporters of Donald Trump. A discussion between bestselling US author Colson Whitehead, Bolivian author Rodrigo Hasbún, Dutch writer Christine Otten and Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma about America in the era of president Trump. Stephan Sanders moderates the conversation and Spoken Beat Night adds a jazzy musical interpretation of the American story.