Reading
Mithu Sanyal and Hugo Hamilton at Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend
Mithu Sanyal will be writer in residence at Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island and will be reading at the memorial weekend alongside Hugo Hamilton and Claire Keegan.
The narrator of Hugo Hamilton’s dazzling new novel is a book itself: Rebellion - Joseph Roth’s masterpiece about a barrel organ player down on his luck. It tells the story of its own rescue from the Nazi book-burnings in May, 1933, and recounts the life of its Austrian-Jewish author, a writer on the run, of his love for his troubled wife Friederike, and the Nazi mental institutions where the Holocaust originated. The book has now come into the hands of Lena Knecht, a young German-American woman who finds a small map drawn by hand on a blank page at the back, a thrilling mystery which leads her to Berlin, the book’s birthplace. A novel told by a novel that reads like a thriller, The Pages carries profound echoes from the past into the present day. It is an inspiring story of the transformative power of art and the survival of literature over a hundred years. Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of -The Speckled People – a memoir of his German-Irish childhood in Dublin, growing up with his German mother and prohibited by his revolutionary Irish father from speaking English. His work has won many international awards, including the French Prix Femina Etranger and the DAAD scholarship in Berlin, as well as the prestigious Bundesverdienstkreutz, awarded by the German state for his understanding of cultural diversity. Hamilton is a member of the Aosdana and lives in Dublin. His latest novel – The Pages – is published by 4th Estate (Harper Collins) in London and Knopf in the USA.
Achill Heinrich Böll Weekend 2022 is supported by Goethe-Institut Irland.