Louise Erdrich and Nuruddin Farah: In Conversation

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Please join the Department of English in welcoming back to the University of Minnesota Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah, who was a visiting writer in 1988, and Minnesota writer Louise Erdrich, who delivered the Joseph Warren Beach Lecture in Literature here in 1996. Farah and Erdrich met recently at a conference and discovered they had much to discuss, a conversation they will continue with this dialogue and reading. Reception follows. Louise Erdrich has written fiction, poetry, children's books, and a memoir. Her debut novel Love Medicine (1984) won the National Book Critics' Circle Award. She has since published ten novels, including The Painted Drum (2005). Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, and is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. Nuruddin Farah is the author of ten novels about his homeland, Somalia. His late Seventies/early Eighties trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship was recently republished by Graywolf Press in partnership with the College of St. Benedict. He won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1998. His latest novel Knots was recently published by Riverhead. Farah has been involved in peacekeeping efforts in Somalia; he lives in Cape Town, South Africa.