Books Unlimited: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen & Gioconda Belli

Writers discuss their novels: Ayelet Gundar-Goschen (Israel) about Waking Lions and Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua) about The Land of the Women.

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Information

Date and time Saturday 19 January 2019 20:45 tot 21:45 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 2

Get to know international literary stars and their recent books. Expect to hear about their motivation to write, the creation of their characters and the worldwide success of their books. Writer and essayist Chris Keulemans talked with Ayelet Gundar-Goschen (Israel) about her second novel Waking Lions and with Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua) about her novel El país de las mujeres (The Land of the Women).
After her debut, One Night, Markovitch, Gundar-Goshen builds up the suspense in her second novel, Waking Lions, which is about a surgeon who must live with the consequences of a car accident. Belli made her international breakthrough with The Inhabited Woman; in 2012 she published The Land of the Women, about a South-American country that since two years is governed solely by women.

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

(Israel, 1982) studied psychology at the University of Tel Aviv and then film at Jerusalem's Sam Spiegel Film School. She has written various screenplays and short stories. Her first novel, One Night, Markovitch (2012) won various (international) prizes. Her second book, Waking Lions (2014) has been translated into many languages and turned into a TV series in the US. The surgeon Etan Green accidentally kills a refugee with his car and drives on. The widow, however, manages to find and blackmail him into providing hundreds of illegals with medical help. Although it reads like a thriller, the novel is mainly about moral questions: should Green have told the truth? Does he help the refugees out of guilt and self-preservation or is he a hero? The reader is continually prodded to ask him- or herself the question: what would I have done?
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Chris Keulemans

(Tunisia, 1960) is a writer, essayist, traveller and popular panel moderator. He has published fiction and non-fiction; was the director of the debating platform and venue De Balie; and was founder of the literary bookshop Perdu and the cultural centre De Tolhuistuin (all in Amsterdam). He performed with Enkidu Khaled in their jointly created documentary play Bagdad. Due to his curiosity about how artists recreate their cities after a crisis, he travelled to Sarajevo, Beirut, Tirana, Algiers, New York, Kiev, Jakarta and Qamishlo. At the invitation of PAX, he wrote Srebrenica & PAX 1995-2020, an overview of 25 years of support to the Association of Women of Srebrenica by the IKV and PAX in response to the genocide in Bosnia. In 2021 he published Gastvrijheid (Hospitality), in which he explores the art of hospitality through a mix of travel stories, observations, memories and imagery.
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Gioconda Belli

(Managua, 1948) is a Nicaraguan poet, writer and political activist. She was involved in the Nicaraguan Revolution from a very young age and occupied important positions in the Sandinista Party and in the revolutionary government. She left the Sandinista Party in 1993. She debuted in 1970 with publications in magazines, wrote politically and erotically oriented poems and received her first literary award in 1972 with many prizes to follow. Her debut novel La Mujer Habitada (The Inhabited Woman), published in 1988, was her international breakthrough. Belli now is a bestselling author whose works have been translated in twenty languages. She now is an influential critic of the government of her former fellow party member Ortega.
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