Columbia University in the City of New York

Harriman Institute

Events

Date

Location

Ismail Kadare: Literature and Tyranny

Ismail Kadare, Albania’s best-known poet and novelist, and winner of the 2005 Man Booker International Prize for literature, will give the Annual Harriman Lecture on Monday, April 17th, at 4pm in the Rotunda of Low Library. The title of Mr. Kadare’s lecture is “Literature and Tyranny.”

In awarding the Booker Prize to Mr. Kadare, the chairman of the prize, Mr. John Carey, said that “Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture–its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters. He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.”

The Harriman Lecture is organized by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, a multi-disciplinary teaching institute dedicated to the study of Russia, the post-Soviet states, East-Central Europe and the Balkans, is the oldest and largest institute of its kind in the United States. Former Harriman Lecturers have included statesmen such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Schmidt, and Vojislav Kostunica, scholars such as Barrington Moore, Jr., Ernest Gellner, and Katherine Verdery, and intellectuals and writers such as Andrei Sinyavsky and Imre Kertesz. The Harriman Lecture is made possible through the generosity of the family of W. Averell Harriman and the Mary W. Harriman Foundation.

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