Pulitzer Prize finalist Hernan Diaz to deliver spring 2021 Finzi-Contini Lecture
Why dwell on made-up stories? Why make them up in the first place? Can fiction, that pack of lies, aspire to some form of truth? Award-winning novelist Hernan Diaz will present a Finzi-Contini lecture titled “The Heart of Fiction” on Tuesday, March 16, at 4:30 pm EST via Zoom.
Hernan Diaz is the author of the novel In the Distance (2017), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, a Publisher’s Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, and winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award. Diaz has received a Whiting Award and fellowships from Bread Loaf and the MacDowell Colony. He has also written a study of Borges’s influence on North American literature, Borges, between History and Eternity (2012), and published work in Cabinet, the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, Playboy, Granta, and the Paris Review. Born in Argentina, Diaz was raised in Sweden and studied in London and in New York, where he now serves as associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University and editor of the Revista Hispánica Moderna.
The Finzi-Contini Lectureship honors Bianca M. Finzi-Contini Calabresi, a scholar of European literature and a native of Ferrara who left fascist Italy for the United States. The lectureship was founded by her sons, the Honorable Guido Calabresi, Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the late Dr. Paul Calabresi. The distinguished list of past lecturers includes Tzvetan Todorov, Orhan Pamuk, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amitav Ghosh, and Masha Gessen. The lectures are devoted to any aspect of comparative literature and culture.
This event is cosponsored by The Yale Review.