Upcoming Events

1 December, 7pm (online)

Joanot Martorell Lecture in Catalan Studies

Professor Robert Davidson (Toronto)

A Renewed Renaixença: Landscape, Narrative, Olfaction

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Pen Faulkner award-winning Call Me Zebra, is a novel of exilic return that draws on Don Quixote, The Inferno and The Odyssey. At its core, though, it is a metatextual and intensely identity-focused book that privileges the places of modern Catalan literature. Within the pantheon of classics that the author engages, Jacint Verdaguer’s Canigó and its eponymous mountain loom largest. But how to interpret the fact that this key Renaixença work figures so centrally in a twenty-first century novel? In this talk, I will explore this question and posit that the book’s genesis in excursionisme echoes that of the epic poem and, as a result, contributes to a renewed trend towards a physical—and even olfactive—experience of the Catalan landscape as a recuperative mode.

Event organised by the Centre for Catalan Studies QMUL and the Instituto Cervantes de Londres.

Admission: free, but registration is essential at:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-renewed-renaixenca-landscape-narrative-olfaction-tickets-203248029327

21 December, 6pm (online)

Queen Mary Catalan Book Club

T’estimo si he begut, Empar Moliner

Join us for a discussion of the book T’estimo si he begut (I Love You When I’m Drunk), written by the Catalan author and journalist Empar Moliner.

Contemporary Catalan writer Empar Moliner is always controversial, whether on television or in writing, and this collection of stories is no exception. Here are we can laugh at those on the right and on the left, Catalans, non-Catalans, reactionaries and couples more PC than their computers.

This book won the Lletra d’Or Prize in 2005 and it is currently being adapted as a musical with the collaboration of Dagoll Dagom, La Brutal and T de Teatre.

“Deft and ingenious.” —Times Literary Supplement

Read it in Catalan or English and come to talk about the strange world of I Love You When I’m Drunk.

The event is free, but places are limited so please register for your ticket.

Presented by the Centre for Catalan Studies.