Haunting the Metropolis: Eloghosa Osunde and Ondjaki
Friday 27th May, 6pm. Merrion Square Park (Le Fanu)
BOOK TICKETS
Writing from the margins, two authors people their cities with outcasts who deserve to be heard.
As a genre, magical realism offers authors the chance to show, layered beneath disguises, the truths that haunt us. And the very perception of reality is different across global cultures. In Vagabonds!, Eloghosa Osunde pulls us into a Lagos shared by people and spirits, giving voice to the lives of queer, trans, and marginalised people, in a celebration of their magical survival. Ondjaki’s Transparent City, endlessly translated since its publication in 2013, is harrowing in its social realism, even as its central character Odonato’s body slowly fades, along with his faith.
Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer and visual artist. In 2021 she was awarded the Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction.
Ondjaki is an Angolan writer, poet, and scriptwriter whose works have been translated globally. He is one of the most prominent African novelists writing in Portuguese today.
‘You don’t read this novel. You swan dive into its sea of gods and monsters, lost girls, violent boys, and well-behaved people both righteous and wicked. And when you finally surface, that sound will be you, gasping in wonder’ – Marlon James on Vagabonds!
‘Ondjaki’s prose shifts through a kaleidoscope of registers, from the poetic to the political, the erotic to the absurd’ – Times Literary Supplement
Presented by ILFDublin in association with Dublin UNESCO City of Literature.