Saturday 17 October 2026, 5pm
Venue: The Wild Detectives — Ideas
Author of The Invisible Years, Rodrigo Hasbún, and Mexican novelist Brenda Navarro come together for a conversation about the ways writers transform personal experience into literature. Their fiction draws on intimate histories, family relationships, memory, displacement, and the experience of living between places, while continually questioning the boundary between a life as it was lived and the story that emerges on the page.
Moderated by John Bradley, the conversation will explore what it means to include our own lives in our books: how writers select, reshape, conceal, or reinvent personal material; what fiction makes possible that memoir may not; and how private experience can open onto larger questions of identity, belonging, loss, and change.
Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian writer and screenwriter. He is the author of eight works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Affections (Simon & Schuster), which received an English PEN Award and has been translated into twelve languages. Named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists in 2010, Hasbún’s short stories have appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Houston.