Public Lectures

Walker Ames Lecturer: Francisco Goldman

Novelist, Journalist
Professor of English Language and Literature, Trinity College, CT

October 27, 2009   |   6:30 p.m.   |   Kane Hall, Room 110

This event is free and open to the public. To guarantee your seat please register by clicking here. Feel free to direct all registration related questions to the UW Alumni Office at: 206-543-0540 or 800-AUW-ALUM.

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The Art of Political Murder

Francisco Goldman, an acclaimed novelist who specializes in recreating poignant episodes in the political and social history of the Americas, will discuss his painstakingly researched account of the assassination of a Guatemalan bishop, Msgr. Juan Gerardi. His bludgeoned body was found lying in a pool of blood in his parish garage on the night of April 26, 1998, just four days after he and a team of human rights investigators announced the publication of a devastating, 1,400-page report blaming Guatemala's security forces for a 30-year reign of murder, torture, massacres and disappearances. Goldman's book is both a horrifying expos' and a triumphant tale of justice belatedly served in a country where the concept had lost all meaning, of institutional evil unmasked in a place where it had long operated behind a thousand disguises, of plodding police work and personal courage overcoming a culture of impunity and fear.

Francisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and 'maestro', at Fundaci'n Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), the journalism school for Latin America created by Gabriel Garc'a M'rquez. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his second, The Ordinary Seaman (1997), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He currently resides in Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York. He also teaches at Trinity College (Connecticut).

In November 2007, he acted as guest-fiction editor for Guernica Magazine. The Ordinary Seaman was named one of the 100 Best American Books of the Century by The Hungry Mind Review. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and of a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship in 2000-2001. His books have been translated and published in a total of eleven languages world-wide.

Goldman's most recent work, The Art of Political Murder: Who killed the Bishop? is a nonfiction account of the assassination of Guatemalan Catholic Bishop Juan Jos' Gerardi Conedera, a crime perpetrated by the Guatemalan military. The book, an expansion on what began as an article in The New Yorker represents the culmination of years of journalistic investigation. It was a New York Times Notable Book, and a Best Book of the Year at Washington Post Book World, The Economist, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Daily News. The book is the winner of the 2008 TR Fyvel Freedom of Expression Book Award from the Index on Censorship and of the 2008 Duke University-WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) Human Rights Book Prize. It was shortlisted for the 2008 Golden Dagger Award in non-fiction and for the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing.

 

Sponsoring Departments:
The Graduate School, www.grad.washington.edu
Department of Comparative Literature, http://depts.washington.edu/complit/

Co-Sponsors:
Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, http://jsis.washington.edu/
Spanish and Portuguese Studies, http://depts.washington.edu/spanport/
Green River Community College, http://www.greenriver.edu/
UW Alumni Association, http://www.washington.edu/alumni/
The Walter H. Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, http://depts.washington.edu/uwch/index.php
University of Puget Sound, http://www.pugetsound.edu/

To Learn More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Goldman
http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum154.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Curiel-t.html

 

Series Sponsors: