Colombian novelist, essayist, journalist, and editor Héctor Abad visits Community Bookstore in Brooklyn to discuss his novel The Farm with journalist and author Michael Greenberg. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.

Héctor Abad is one of Colombia’s leading writers. Born in 1958, he grew up in Medellín, where he studied medicine, philosophy and journalism. In 1987, his father was murdered by Colombian paramilitaries, an event he reflected on 20 years later in Oblivion: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), which earned widespread critical acclaim as well as the WOLA-Duke Book Award. Abad writes a weekly column for Colombia’s national newspaper El Espectador. The Farm won the 2015 Cálamo Prize in Spain and was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize.

Michael Greenberg’s memoir, Hurry Down Sunshine, has been translated into eighteen languages and was named a best book of the year by Time Magazine, Library Journal, and Amazon.com. A collection of his essays, Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, was published in 2009. From 2003-2009, Greenberg wrote the “Freelance” column in the Times Literary Supplement. In 2010-2012 he was the author and creator of “The Accidentalist” column in Bookforum.  He teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University and is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, where he has published essays about New York City’s housing emergency, the NYPD, immigration, Occupy Wall Street, and Hurricane Sandy, among other subjects.