We’re delighted to be at the Brooklyn Book Festival again this year— we invite you to visit us at our booth, and to join in for a conversation  between Scholastique Mukasonga, author of Kibogo, and Russian writer-in-exile Vladimir Sorokin, who will talk about time, myths and legends that shape communities, and changes they have to undertake. The event will take place in the Center for Brooklyn History on October 2nd, at 12pm EST.

Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and under-developed Bugesera district of Rwanda. Mukasonga was later forced to leave the school of social work in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. Her first novel, Our Lady Of The Nile, won the Ahamadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012, as well as the Océans France Ô prize in 2013 and the French Voices Award in 2014; it was also shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2019, The Barefoot Woman was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature. In 2019, her novel Our Lady Of The Nile was adapted into a film by Atiq Rahimi. Her new novel Kibogo comes out in September.

Vladimir Sorokin was a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue, was published by the famed émigré dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1985. In 1992, Sorokin’s Their Four Hearts was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. In 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer. In 2001, he received the Andrei Bely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. His latest book, Telluria, comes out in August.