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Titaua Peu, author of Pina, will attending this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival on Festival Day. She will part of the in-person conversation, “Shattered Families,” with authors Namwali Serpell of The Furrows and Muriel Villanueva of The Left Parenthesis. As Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But how do families break apart and splinter, and what remains for those who survive?

Throughout the Festival week, literary themed Bookend events including poetry, film, performances, and more will be brought to all five boroughs. We hope to see you there!

When: Sunday, October 2, 1 pm EST
Where: Center Stage, Columbus Park outside Brooklyn Borough Hall
209 Joralemon St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

PARTICIPANTS

Titaua Peu is a Tahitian author known for her politically charged, realistic portrayal of the effects of colonialism on contemporary Polynesia. Peu’s unsparing first novel, Mutismes, was published in 2003, sparking immediate scandal and making her the youngest-ever published Tahitian author at age twenty-eight. Pina was awarded the 2017 Eugène Dabit Prize, a first for Polynesian literature. She currently lives in Tahiti where she serves as the general manager of the municipality of Pā'ea.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives in New York. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The Furrows is her most recent novel. She is currently a professor of English at Harvard University.

Muriel Villanueva is a writer, author of more than thirty literary works for all ages, including novels, storybooks, poems, plays and short films, as well as short publications in anthologies and online. She has been given more than a dozen awards, including J.M. Casero, Crítica dels Escriptors Valencians, Carlemany, Atrapallibres and the Llibreter. She has been translated into Spanish, English, Portuguese, Polish, Korean and Chinese. Her first novel translated into English is The Left Parenthesis.