Monday, June 9, 2025
3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. CEST
Location: Villa Malta (Rome) La Sala
A vast majority of the world’s population lives in the non-Western world and retains religious commitments whose histories long predate modernity. To what extent has the modern and contemporary literature produced in the West, a project largely by and for a secular bourgeois intelligentsia, acknowledged this transcendent dimension (or failed to do so) in the lives of billions of people? Can literature, which "engages our concrete existence, with its innate tensions desires, and meaningful experiences" (Pope Francis), better bridge these different worlds? To what extent does a tension between the secular and the transcendent characterize each of them?
Participants
Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid is an acclaimed British Pakistani author known for creative fiction and commentary that address contemporary global issues. His recent novels include The Last White Man (2022) and Exit West (2017), which received the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His book The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and later adapted into a successful film. Hamid’s engagement with themes of political turmoil, cultural displacement, and shifting individual and collective identities informs his influential essays on contemporary affairs in leading outlets including the Guardian, New York Times, and Paris Review.
Tash Aw
Tash Aw, raised in Malaysia and educated in England, is a novelist and writer of short-fiction whose work illuminates the historic and contemporary experience of Southeast Asia. Two of his novels, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) and Five Star Billionaire (2013), have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize. His short fiction has won an O. Henry Prize and been published in A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, among other outlets. Aw’s work has been translated into 23 languages. Based in London, he often returns to Asia and is a writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote is an Indian poet, theorist, and curator whose influential work centers on the complex history and presence of cultural pluralism from the local to the global. He has authored eight books of poetry—including Icelight (2022), Jonahwhale (2018), and a translation of a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic-poet, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd (2011)—and the acclaimed 2012 book Confluences: Forgotten Histories between East and West (with Ilija Trojanow). Hoskote has curated more than 50 showcases of Indian and global art over the past three decades, including India’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by June 2 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.