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The long arm of history reverberates through the fiction of three international stars—from internationally acclaimed Icelandic novelist, Sjón, who imagines how a young man turns to Nazi-inspired fascism in the 60s in his forthcoming novel, Red Milk; to Sheng Keyi, whose parable of Tiananmen Square’s official erasure, Death Fugue, is, ironically, banned in China; to Havana’s crime master, Leonardo Padura, whose new novel, The Transparency of Time, travels through time to solve the mystery of a missing Black Madonna statue. Moderated by Eric Banks, Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

When: October 3 at 6 pm Eastern
Where: Twilight Zones of History at Brooklyn Book Festival (virtual)

Sheng Keyi was born in a small town in southern China and has lived in Shenzhen and Beijing. She is the author of ten novels, including Northern Girls, Death Fugue, Wild Fruit, The Metaphor Detox Centre, The Womb, and Paradise, as well as numerous short stories and novellas. Her work has been translated into a number of foreign languages and published all over the world. She has received several literary awards, including the Chinese People’s Literature Prize, the Yu Dafu Prize for Fiction, and the Chinese Literature Media Award. Her debut novel in English translation, Northern Girls, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012.

Born in Reykjavík in 1962, Sjón is the author of five previous novels, for which he has won several awards. In addition, he has written more than five poetry collections, several opera librettos, and lyrics for various artists, including Björk. He was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics in Dancer in the Dark and co-wrote the script of the film The Northman with director Robert Eggers. In 2017 he became the third writer – following Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell – to contribute to Future Library, a public artwork based in Norway spanning 100 years. Red Milk is his most recent novel.

Leonardo Padura was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1955. Author of The Man Who Loved Dogs and Heretics, his genre-bending literary crime novels featuring detective Mario Conde have been widely translated and form the basis for Netflix’s 2016 miniseries, Four Seasons in Havana.

Eric Banks is a writer and critic based in New York. He is director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and was formerly editor in chief of Bookforum and president of the National Book Critics Circle.

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