Sofi Oksanen and Tommy Wieringa Read at Albright Knox

Talking Leaves…Books and the Just Buffalo Literary Center are pleased to announce that Buffalo has been chosen by PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, a celebration of world writers held for the past five years in New York City, as one of the additional venues for the sixth annual festival. We will be hosting, as a free extra event in Just Buffalo’s acclaimed BABEL series, a pair of young European writers whose novels are appearing in English translation for the first time this spring. Sofi Oksanen of Finland, and Tommy Wieringa of the Netherlands will read from and discuss their work on Sunday, April 25, at 3 pm, in the auditorium of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Coming just days after the appearance in the BABEL series of Salman Rushdie, founder and chair of the PEN World Voices Festival, this event is a great honor for Buffalo, and for Just Buffalo and its collaborators.

Soon to be published in twenty-five languages, Sofi Oksanen's award-winning novel Purge is a breathtakingly suspenseful tale of two women dogged by their own shameful pasts and the dark, unspoken history that binds them. When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide's home is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other's motives; gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia's Soviet occupation. Purge is a fiercely compelling and damning novel about the corrosive effects of shame, and of life in a time and place where to survive is to be implicated.

Sofi Oksanen is a thirty-three year old novelist and playwright of Finnish-Estonian descent. She is the author of the novels Stalin's Cows (2003) and Baby Jane (2005). Purge (2008), the first book to win both of Finland's top literary awards, the Finlandia and the Runeberg, marks her English language debut. The novel is based on her acclaimed and controversial play of the same name, originally staged at the National Theater in Helsinki in 2007. In 2009, Oksanen was named Estonia's "Person of the Year." She lives in Helsinki.

Tommy Wieringa was born in 1967 and grew up in the Netherlands and in the tropics. He is the author of two previous novels, one of which won Holland's Halewijn Prize and was nominated for the AKO Literature Prize. This is his first novel to be published in English.

In Joe Speedboat, a sparkling coming-of-age novel that "recalls The World According to Garp" (NRC Handelsblad ) and has sold over 300,000 copies in Holland, the inhabitants of a sleepy rural town are shaken awake by the arrival of a kinetic young visionary, the eponymous Joe. After a violent farming accident plunges him into a coma for six months, young Frankie Hermans wakes up to discover that he's paralyzed and mute. Bound to a wheelchair, Frankie struggles to adjust to a life where he must rely on family and friends to complete even the simplest tasks. The only body part he can control is his right arm, which he uses obsessively to record all the details of daily life in his town. But when he meets Joe Speedboat, a boy who blazed into town like a meteor while Frankie slept, everything changes. Joe is a centrifugal force with the touch of a magician and the spirit of a daredevil, and he alone sees the potential strength in Frankie's handicaps. With Joe's help, Frankie's good arm will be used for more than just writing: as a champion arm-wrestler, Frankie will be powerful enough to win back his friends, and maybe even woo P. J., the corkscrew-haired girl who has them all in a tailspin. Alive and exuberant with the profundities of adolescence, Joe Speedboat is the supersonic story of an unlikely alliance and a lightning-quick dash to grow up.

PEN American Center is the U.S. branch of the world’s oldest international literary and human rights organization. Throughout its 85-year history, PEN American Center has remained a writer-centered organization in which members play a leading role. PEN presidents, such as Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and Salman Rushdie have, and continue to place themselves at the forefront of the struggle to oppose censorship and defend writers. For one week each spring, the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature showcases the work of more than 50 international writers from across the globe in conversations, readings, performances, and panels together with their American counterparts for an exciting cross-cultural celebration of the written word. Chaired by Salman Rushdie, the Festival has featured such luminaries as Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan, and Mario Vargas Llosa to name just a few. In 2010, the Festival is expanding beyond its base of New York City, and has chosen Buffalo as one of the featured venues.

BABEL is a collaborative project of the Just Buffalo Literary Center, with Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, the International Institute & Talking Leaves…Books. This reading, a BABEL extra event instigated and curated by Jonathon Welch of Talking Leaves…Books, is presented with the generous support of UB’s Humanities Institute, UB’s Department of English, Riverrun, the Canisius College Contemporary Writers Series, and Ethnographic Dreamworlds at Buffalo State College. Special thanks to Grove/Atlantic Publishers, whose Black Cat imprint is publishing the featured authors and supporting their appearance in Buffalo.