Festival della Mente | Francesca Mannocchi & Viet Thanh Nguyen

Date and time

Saturday, August 31

3:00 PM

Location

1 Piazza Matteotti, Sarzana, Italy

About this event

A new gratitude…

What does it mean to be both a Vietnamese refugee and an American? To feel both like a victim and a perpetrator? To leave behind a war yet have a conflicted relationship with the country that takes you in? This experience embodies a complex duality between adapting and searching for a new sense of belonging. By integrating the memory of the past with the present, a balance and a deep sense of gratitude can be found. The Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and the Italian journalist and writer Francesca Mannocchi will explore essential themes to help us understand the world around us: identity, memory, the end of the American dream, and the immense power of literature.

Francesca Mannocchi, Italian journalist and writer, writes about migration and conflicts and contributes to Italian and international newspapers. She has covered several stories in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, Ukraine, Yemen. She has published: “Porti ciascuno la sua colpa” (Laterza, 2019), “Libia” (ink Mondadori, 2020), “Io Khaled vendo uomini e sono innocente” (Einaudi, 2019), “Bianco è il colore del danno” (Einaudi, 2021) and “Lo sguardo oltre il confine” (DeAgostini, 2022).

Viet Thanh Nguyen teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.: “The Sympathizer” (2015, Pulitzer Prize for fiction), adapted into a TV miniseries, “The Refugees” (2016), “Nothing ever dies” (2018), “The Committed” (2021). His books are translated into Italian by Neri Pozza, and his latest novel, “A Man with Two Faces” will be translated into Italian and published in August.