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Litfest is delighted that the 4th Lancaster International Fiction Lecture, a collaboration with the Departments of Languages & Cultures and English Literature & Creative Writing and the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at Lancaster University, will be given by Guadalupe Nettel.

Fiction is an artform shared by almost all languages. Right now, the English-speaking world is ever more aware of the extraordinary fiction that has been and is being written everywhere and in all languages, thanks to translators and innovative publishers. For this reason it seems to us that an annual lecture to discuss and celebrate fiction as an international artform is needed more than ever. 

'Just as ancient alchemists sought to transmute base metals into gold, the literary artist endeavours to turn the painful nature of human experience – whether physical, emotional, psychological, or even collective – into textual moments of remarkable and moving beauty.' 

In her lecture Guadalupe Nettel develops her theme and considers the work of writers who have been successful in this enterprise, including Emmanuel Carrère, Joan Didion, Alda Merini and Gaël Faye, and shows how these literary magicians extract empathy from darkness to connect individuals, cultures and generations. 

Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico and grew up ‘between Mexico and France’. She is the author of the award-winning novels The Body Where I Was Born (2011), After the Winter (2014, Herralde Novel Prize) and Still Born (2020), and three collections of short stories. She was editor of the prestigious Revista de la Universidad de México (2017–24) and her work has been translated into more than 15 languages.

Autumn Weekend 2024: The Lancaster International Fiction Lecture 2024