It’ll undoubtedly be one of the highlights of the fourth edition of the 42 Festival: for the first time, live in Barcelona, we’ll be able to hear from American author Ted Chiang, one of the world’s leading speculative fiction writers. Over the course of an 80-minute conversation with Karen Madrid, one of Catalonia’s most avid bookworms in this genre, the author of Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others, winner of four Hugo awards and four Nebula awards and brought to the big screen by Denis Villeneuve in Arrival, will share his poetic and demanding perspective on fantastic genres, so unique that he refused a Hugo Award in 2003 because he had submitted the work to his publisher too soon and wasn’t satisfied with it. With only two short story collections, published in Catalan by Mai Més (in Spanish by Sexto Piso), Chiang has established himself as a must-read author thanks to his perfectionism, sensitivity and unprecedented approach to explaining what makes us human. His science fiction stories show that the genre, when done right, can reach pinnacles of beauty, knowledge, meaning and compassion found nowhere else in our universe.

Guest:

Ted Chiang

Moderator:

Karen Madrid Ribas

*Simultaneous interpreting into Catalan available