THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT. TO ADD YOUR NAME TO THE WAITING LIST PLEASE EMAIL: [email protected] Gloucester Road Books presents a rare opportunity to hear from the multi-award-winning Guatemalan author, Eduardo Halfon, and his translator, Daniel Hahn. They will be discussing Halfon's unforgettable novel, Tarantula, his fifth to be translated into English. Winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger in France and the Premio de la Critica in Spain, Tarantula is based on the author's time spent at a concentration camp re-enactment as a 12-year-old in 1980s Guatemala. It is an uncompromising examination of the Holocaust's far-reaching, devastating legacy as decades later that same 12-year-old, now a successful writer, encounters the camp's counsellor and discovers the deeper truth behind an experience that indelibly scarred his life. In the words of the novel’s publisher, Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton: “It (Tarantula) is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement… and how the past lives on in the present.” --- ‘Among [Halfon’s] preoccupations are the legacy of violence and mass murder in Europe and Latin America; the frequency and facility with which the past intrudes upon the present; the quixotic effort to separate family myth from historical fact; and the ways in which pleasure consoles us’ New York Review of Books ‘This novel about a violent and traumatic childhood episode is eerily current – the questions it raises about identity, resistance and history are both deeply personal and universal.’ Mariana Enriquez ‘This taut, magisterial novel explores the possibility of disentangling one's trauma and one's roots’ Le Monde Des Livres (France) --- Eduardo Halfon is the author of fifteen novels examining questions of identity, memory and history as a Jewish man, as a Guatemalan, as a descendant of European and Middle Eastern refugees, including The Polish Boxer, Mourning and Canción. He has received international literary awards including the Prix Médicis Étranger, the Prix Roger Caillois and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France, the Premio de la Crítica and the Premio José María de Pereda in Spain, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and the International Latino Book Award in the US, and the National Prize in Literature of Guatemala, his country’s highest literary honour. Eduardo Halfon was named one of the thirty-nine most promising young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival in Bogotá and is a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator. He is the author of If This Be Magic: the unlikely art of Shakespeare in translation, and co-editor (with Padma Viswanathan) of The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories, both forthcoming in 2026. He is currently translating an Angolan novel. Photo credit: Eduardo Halfon by David Herranz. Daniel Hahn (c) Camila França Photograph

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