Moyez G. Vassanji, award-winning author of The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets, will deliver a Society for the Humanities lecture titled "Diaspora and the Critical Imagination," today, Oct. 25, at 4:30 p.m. in the Andrew Dickson White House on campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Vassanji also will meet with students for dinner and give a reading and discussion tonight at 7:15 p.m. in the first floor TV lounge in the Robert Purcell Marketplace on North Campus.
Vassanji is a Canadian citizen of Indian descent who was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and was raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974 and a Ph.D in theoretical nuclear physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. In 1989, he was an international writer in residence at the University of Iowa and, in 1996, a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.
His first novel, The Gunny Sack, won the 1990 Commonwealth Regional Prize for best first novel in 1990. In 1994, Vassanji won the Giller Prize for best work of fiction in Canada and the Bressani Italian Canadian Award for The Book of Secrets.
Vassanji's talk shares the title of this year's theme at the Society for the Humanities. Shawkat Toorawa, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell, is a society fellow this year and is using Vassanji's 1999 novel Amriika in his society seminar.
Vassanji's lecture and reading are sponsored at Cornell by the Faculty Programs in Residential Communities, the Society for the Humanities, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, the Africana Studies and Research Center, the Religious Studies Program and the Department of Comparative Literature.
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