Book Launch, Reading and Talk with Bernardo Carvalho featuring Prof. Dr. Susanne Klengel and Douglas Pompeu.

Asked how to characterise his writing process in a 2008 interview for BOMB Magazine, Bernardo Carvalho said, "I don't have a hold over the real. But what’s incredible is that things happen and, surprisingly, everything converges toward the novel, as if the real were conspiring with me."

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960, Bernardo Carvalho is a writer, journalist, dramaturg and translator. He has published a volume of short stories (Aberração, 1993), three plays and eleven novels, including Nine Nights (Prêmio Machado de Assis, Prêmio Portugal Telecom), Reprodução (Prêmio Jabuti) and Simpatia pelo Demônio (2016). His works, published in Brazil by Companhia das Letras, have been translated into more than ten languages. In 2011/12 he received a DAAD Artist Grant and spent a year in Berlin. He is currently the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin. He also writes columns for the Folha de Sao Paulo, for which he has previously worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris and New York.

The publication of Bernardo Carvalho's Berlin Diary by alba.edition is part of the research project "Writing Berlin" at the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities. Doing Literature in a Global Perspective", Freie Universität Berlin. The Berlin Diary reveals the writing process of an experienced author. We are invited to witness Carvalho’s experiment of writing everyday impressions in Berlin as snapshots that do not resort to artistic and literary mannerisms. Nevertheless, one often has the feeling that something threatening lurks within the text. In this diary, Carvalho exposes himself more than ever to situations that are rich in experience – whether in familiar places like his own apartment, or in conspicuous places like a sauna or a plush bar.

Reading in German and Portuguese, conversation in English/Portuguese

Further Information here.