International authors take center stage at festival
From the very first Bay Area Book Festival in 2015, the sessions featuring international authors have been among the most popular, according to Cherilyn Parsons, the festival’s founder and executive director.
“The Bay Area is international in population as well as outlook, and residents are eager to hear the perspectives of other cultures,” she said.
With the help of cultural institutes and consulates, the fourth edition of the festival again will provide a showcase for writers from around the globe.
“We’re one of the most international weekend literary festivals in the nation,” Parsons said.
Some of the celebrated authors this year include Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan novelist, memoirist and former political prisoner often considered for the Nobel Prize, and novelist Masatsugu Ono, awarded Japan’s highest literary honor, the Akutagawa Prize, in 2015.
Currently a professor of English and comparative literature at UC Irvine, wa Thiong’o will appear at the Freight & Salvage at 11:45 a.m. Saturday, April 28, to talk about “Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir,” written in the early 1980s but not published in the United States until last month.
Ono will participate in “Knots of Wonder: Stunning Short Fiction,” a panel discussion with short story writers Gunnhild Øyehaug of Norway and David Hayden of Ireland at 3:15 p.m. April 28 at the Hotel Shattuck Plaza.
Hailed as a “master” of storytelling in a recent New Yorker profile, Øyehaug also takes part in “Smart Women Everywhere: Women Calling the Shots in Global Fiction,” a 10:30 a.m. session Sunday, April 29, at the Magnes Museum. The panel, which includes Swedish novelist Therese Bohman as well as American writers born in Iran and India, epitomizes the 2018 festival’s emphasis not only on international authors but also on women.
Øyehaug, whose 2009 novel “Wait, Blink” will appear in an English translation in June, cites Virginia Woolf as one of her literary influences.
“(Woolf’s) essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ was crucial to me as a writer,” Oyehaug said. “Her essayistic brilliance and way of embodying thoughts, moving freely between thoughts and fictive characters, made a great impact on me, both as an essayist but also in my fiction. I think that if you establish your point of view, in a literary text, be it a short story or a novel, far above the characters and actions and whatever the text is based upon, you’ll get the possibility of range, and not just the close-up.”
Irish novelist Eimear McBride, who will appear in two sessions being held at Berkeley City College, has been praised for a narrative style as distinctive as Woolf’s and James Joyce’s. Rather than describing it as stream of consciousness, “I think of it as more of a stream-of-existence,” she said.
“It’s trying to recreate not only the workings of the mind but also the life of the body and how those two interact. I want the reader to experience what my characters are experiencing as though it was first-hand,” McBride said. “Although it looks odd on the page, it’s actually just hyper-realism and, once they get over the strange punctuation, readers usually get that pretty quick.”
Novelist Sylvia Brownrigg will interview McBride, whose 2013 debut novel “A Girl Is a HalfFormed Thing” won Britain’s Goldsmiths and Baileys prizes, at 1:30 p.m. April 28. At 10 a.m. the same day, McBride joins David Hayden and novelist Liz Nugent in “Breaking Literary Ground: Ambitious Young Writers from Ireland,” a panel discussion moderated by Rosemary Graham, who teaches Irish and American literature and creative writing at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga.
Female writers figure prominently in the festival’s “Nordic Noir” session, historically one of the most well attended, according to Parsons. The lineup for this year’s panel discussion, 2 p.m. April 29 at the Magnes Museum, includes three best-selling crime authors who are women — Iceland’s Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, Denmark’s Sara Blaedel and Norway’s Anne Holt — as well as their male colleagues Karo Hämäläinen of Finland and Steffen Jacobsen of Norway.
Sigurdardóttir, author of “Silence of the Sea,” will introduce the first installment of her new series, “The Legacy: A Thriller,” at the festival.
She’ll also participate in two other sessions: “Women Plot the Crime,” at 1:30 p.m. April 28 at Hotel Shattuck Plaza, on a panel with Blaedel and Holt moderated by crime writer Cara Black; and “The Nature of Evil: Stories on Darkness,” with Nugent, Jacobsen and Hämäläinen, moderated by Brian Cliff.
Sigurdardóttir says she has fond memories of her first appearance at the Bay Area Book Festival, in 2015.
“What struck me the most was how engaged the audience was and how many lovers of books there were in the area,” she said. “Book lovers are the best people.”
Calling the festival “extremely fun,” Sigurdardóttir adds, “I was impressed at the variety of authors on the program, which I think is the key. Everyone should be able to find something to enjoy, no matter what their preference and interest.”