The Festival’s closing day opens at 10:30 a.m. at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia with Stevo Grabovac (Serbia – Bosnia and Herzegovina) in conversation with Marija Bradaš. Born in 1978 in Slavonski Brod, Grabovac is one of the most original voices in contemporary Balkan literature; his novel After the Party was awarded the 70th NIN Prize, the most prestigious literary recognition in the former Yugoslav region.
At 12 p.m., also at Querini Stampalia, Sara Stridsberg (Sweden) will be in conversation with Sara Culeddu and Massimo Ciaravolo. An internationally acclaimed writer and playwright, born in 1972, Stridsberg is a member of the Swedish Academy; her works have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and she is regarded as one of the leading feminist and artistic voices in contemporary Sweden.
On Saturday afternoon, at 5 p.m., Geoff Dyer (United Kingdom) and Dayanita Singh (India) will be the protagonists of an event at the Auditorium Santa Margherita.
Geoff Dyer, born in Cheltenham in 1958, is considered one of the most important contemporary English writers and essayists; his books, translated into 24 languages, blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, engaging with subjects such as jazz, photography, cinema, war, and travel.
Dayanita Singh, born in New Delhi in 1961, lives and works in India and is one of the most internationally recognized figures in contemporary photography; over the course of her career she has received awards including the Infinity Award and the prestigious Hasselblad Award. Her practice combines photography, artist’s books, and installation, exploring how images are organized, read, and reinterpreted, with a particular focus on sequence, archive, and memory. She presents the solo exhibition ARCHIVIO at the State Archives of Venice, celebrating Italian archives (in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of New Delhi, the State Archives of Venice, the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome, and the Museum of Oriental Art in Turin). The exhibition will be open to the public from April 17 to July 31.
At 7 p.m., the Festival concludes at the Auditorium Santa Margherita with Zadie Smith (United Kingdom). Born in London in 1975 to a Jamaican mother and an English father, Smith is one of the most authoritative voices in contemporary literature. At just 23, she rose to international prominence with White Teeth, an immediate success and a landmark novel: polyphonic and sharply ironic, it portrays multicultural London at the turn of the millennium with a vitality that has made it a contemporary classic. Since then, she has continued to reshape the forms and themes of contemporary fiction, publishing novels, short stories, and essays, and receiving major literary and academic recognition.
