José Eduardo Agualusa

"Imagine Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago transplanted to tropical Africa, chopped up into glittering, bloodstained fragments and set to dance to a delirious rumba. Then you might begin to take the measure of this novel of a revolution that devours its children. When Angola's Jose Eduardo Agualusa won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007 with The Book of Chameleons, readers glimpsed the scars of betrayal, loss and grief that lay behind its magically charming surfaces. Yet, without a prior grasp of Angola's punishing trek from Portuguese rule past a disputed independence and into decades of sporadic civil strife, the picture for outsiders remained a little blurred."
Read more of a review of the Rainy Season

"How many truths make up a lie? This is the question a man asks his daughter, Laurentina, before revealing that her true father is Faustino Manso, the celebrated Angolan musician. The man whom Laurentina has always known as her father defends his lie on the grounds that it contained many truths, all of them happy."
Read more of a review of My Father's Wives

José Eduardo Agualusa s a growing name in world literature. He was born in Huambo, Angola, and began his writing career as a poet. He is the author of the poetry collection At the Heart of the Forests, three books of stories, and the novels The Conspiracy, The Market of the Damned, The Rainy Season, Creole, and The Book of Chameleons, as well as Lisboa Africana, a collaborative project on Lisbon's African community. Agualusa has already been embraced across the Portuguese-speaking literary world. His novel Creole was a best seller and awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature. He has received the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the U.K. for the novel The Rainy Season. We are delighted to have him in Bergen.

The host, George Chabert , professor in French cultural history at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, is from Mozambique. His mother is from Angola. In this conversation the two will explore Agualusas's authorship.