The Istanbul Quintet

ASERI is pleased to present the volume

The Istanbul quintet.
Confluences and intertwining between life and writing in transculturality
Arianna Dagnino
Ed. Ensemble

Thursday 14 October, 6.30 pm
in ASERI (Via San Vittore 18) and ONLINE

Introduces:
Prof. Vittorio Emanuele Parsi, ASERI Director

Speakers:
Prof. Arianna Dagnino, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada)
Dr. Stefano Vastano, journalist
Dr. Paolo Maria Noseda, interpreter and translator

"My father played jazz, at the age of twenty, in post-war Italy, without a penny in his pocket and echoes of America in his ears. He would have liked to emigrate to Australia like his cousin, but..." ("The Istanbul Quintet")

A writer is a neomad, a polyglot, a dispatriate, a tireless traveler. He adapts to the various cultural environments in which he writes and describes, and this is how he makes culture, which reinvents it for the new century. In these pages, Arianna Dagnino meets five transcultural writers, her Quintet: in the year of closed borders, she talks on a train to Istanbul with Ilija Trojanow, sips a cup of çay with Brian Castro, is naked in the vapors of a Turkish bath with Inez Baranay, sails aboard a gulet with Alberto Manguel, converses dreamily in the shadow of the Galata Tower with Tim Parks. Spoken in a sort of imaginary literary salon on the shores of the Bosphorus, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, the words of this new species of writers are the alluvial material on which the new literary current of Transculturalism is being built.

Arianna Dagnino (Genoese by birth and spirit) is a writer, journalist, literary translator and lecturer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He has lived in England, the former Soviet Union, the United States, South Africa and Australia, where he obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of South Australia. He has collaborated with important Italian publishing houses and the major national newspapers ("La Stampa", "Il Corriere della Sera", "L'Espresso"). She is the author of the transcultural novels Fossili (Fazi, Rome) and The Afrikaner (Guernica, Toronto) and of numerous essays on the impact of techno-scientific innovation and socio-cultural dynamics triggered by globalization as well as articles for the most quoted journals in the field of comparative literature and transcultural studies. www.ariannadagnino.com

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST