Herta Mueller to speak at BU

2009 Nobel Laureate in Literature
Herta Müller

Saturday, May 12, at 4:00 p.m.
Barrister’s Hall, Boston University Law School (behind March Chapel)
765 Commonwealth Avenue

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

Herta Müller is the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was born in 1953 in a German-speaking town in Banat, Romania, where her parents were members of the German-speaking minority. Her father served in the Waffen-SS in World War II, and her mother was deported to a work camp in the Soviet Union in 1945. At university, Ms. Müller opposed the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu and joined Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of dissident writers who sought freedom of speech. She emigrated to Germany in 1987 after years of persecution and censorship in Romania. Her early works depict village life and the repression its residents face. Her later novels, including "The Land of Green Plums" and "The Appointment", approach allegory in their graphic portrayals of the brutality suffered by modest people living under totalitarianism.

Moderated by Askold Melnyczuk and William Pierce. Melnyczuk is founding editor of AGNI and the author of three novels, most recently "The House of Widows". He has published stories, poems, translations, and reviews in The New York Times, The Nation, The Partisan Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Boston Globe. Among his many honors are the Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction and the McGinnis Award in Fiction. Pierce’s fiction has appeared in Granta, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He is senior editor of AGNI, where he contributes a series of essays called “Crucibles.”

Sponsored by BU’s Center for the Study of Europe, AGNI and the Goethe Institut Boston.

BU ALUM NAMED ASME FINALIST

William Giraldi, a 2004 graduate of the BU MFA program in fiction, has been named a 2011 National Magazine Awards Finalist for his essay "The Physics of Speed" in the Fall 2010 issue of The Antioch Review. From the essay:

In the following days I learned that absence takes up space, has mass, moves from room to room. Grief is much heavier than fear. Fear hung before me in anticipation, whereas the grief was planted like a sequoia in my stomach, its roots reaching far down into my legs for water, its branches reaching up through my arms and torso and neck, the poison from its fruit spilling into my cells. Each terrible dawn stretched across the day and illuminated my father's absence.

 If you'd like to read the whole piece, subscribe to The Antioch Review, or ask to borrow my copy -- I'm happy to mail it out.