Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o at the Brooklyn Book Festival
October 4, 2020
- 7:00 pm ET
Brooklyn Book Festival
Virtual Event,

The 2020 Brooklyn Book Festival hosts the online event "Time-Travelers: From Creation Myths to Future Worlds" with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Alexis Wright, two giants of contemporary literature, share creative visions that encompass millennia. For more than a half-century, Kenyan author Ngũgĩ  has been creating a highly-influential body of work ranging from novels, stories, plays, and memoir to radical essays on literary decolonization and language. His latest work, The Perfect Nine (published by The New Press), marks something of a departure: a novel-in-verse that reimagines the origin story of the Gikuyu people of Kenya, blending folklore, mythology and allegory. Alexis Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, is a towering figure herself, whose 2007 Miles Franklin prize-winning novel, Carpenteria, remains a landmark in Indigenous literature. The Swan Book, her most recent novel, is set in the distant future, with Aboriginal peoples living in an environment altered by climate change, drawing powerfully from myth, legend and fairy tale. Moderated by Caro Llewellyn.