Monday, November 3, 2025
6:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. (GMT+01:00) Madrid
Location: Online Livestream
The decline of representative politics and social media’s invasion of the public sphere have made it more difficult to build coalitions to oppose social inequality and political repression. A hyper-individualist culture is dominant even among those opposed to contemporary economic and political arrangements. How can writers and activists work together in new ways to advance solidarity, nationally and internationally?
Participants
Hisham Matar
Hisham Matar, author of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir The Return (2016), explores themes of exile, identity, and belonging. Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his life in London. He is also the author of In the Country of Men (2007), shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011); and A Month in Siena (2019). His novel My Friends (2024) won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.
Ece Temelkuran
Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish novelist, a political thinker, and a leading analyst of the erosion of democracy and the challenge of populism on a global scale. She is the author of Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now (2021) as well as the acclaimed How to Lose a Country. The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship (2019). Her novels are published in several languages. A frequent contributor to the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, and other leading outlets, she is the recipient of the PEN Translates Award and the Freedom of Thought Award from the Human Rights Association of Turkey. In 2023 she received the El Mundo Award for her body of work.
Marina Garcés
Marina Garcés is a philosopher, activist, and teacher whose work addresses politics and critical thinking, with a focus on action and emancipation grounded in an awareness of our interdependence in a shared world. She is the author of several essay collections, including Filosofía inacabada (Unfinished Philosophy) and Malas compañías (Bad Company). Among her recent books are Humanitats en acció (Humanity in Action, 2019) and Pedagogies i emancipació (Pedagogies and Emancipation, 2020). Garcés is currently the director and member of the faculty of the Master’s Degree in Philosophy for Contemporary Challenges at the Open University of Catalonia.
Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra is a renowned Indian author, essayist, and literary critic with a global readership. Two of his prize-winning books, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (2012) and Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), explore the history of colonialism and its enduring legacies in our contemporary global era. Mishra is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The Romantics (1999) and Run and Hide (2022). His columns and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books, among other outlets. Mishra is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by October 27 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.