We are delighted to announce the first Lancaster International Fiction Lecture, a joint venture with the Department of European Languages & Cultures and the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

Fiction is an artform shared by almost all languages. Right now, as the English-speaking world – thanks to translators and innovative publishers – has become more aware of the extraordinary fiction that has been and is being written everywhere and in all languages, it seemed to us that a lecture to discuss and celebrate fiction as an international artform could not be more timely.

‘Juan Gabriel Vásquez . . . has succeeded García Márquez as the literary grandmaster of Colombia’ – Ariel Dorfman, New York Review of Books
‘A masterful writer’ – Nicole Krauss

Juan Gabriel Vásquez grew up in the Colombian capital of Bogotá in the shadow of Gabriel García Márquez, the long guerrilla war that has not yet ended, and the shadow of Pablo Escobar and the narcotraficantes. How do you escape that first shadow of the most influential writer in your country, not to mention for a time the world, to write fiction about your own reality and take on and make imaginative sense of those other shadows of violence and corruption? This is the challenge that Vásquez has accepted both in his fiction and in his journalism, and which he will discuss in this first Lancaster International Fiction Lecture.