Benjamin Labatut: The Chilean writer – Phenomenon at the Onassis Foundation Stegi

A superb literate caput of our time, Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut, who has been characterized arsenic the caller improvement successful planetary literature, is coming to Greece to talk connected May 21 astatine 8:30 PM connected the Main Stage of the Onassis Foundation Stegi. The award-winning author, who transcends the boundaries of effort and fiction, world and imagination, volition prosecute successful an intriguing treatment with the Foundation’s Director of Culture, Afroditi Panayiotakou.

Labatut defies categorization and limitations, creating a new, hybrid genre that captivates some audiences and critics. Balancing betwixt subject and storytelling, genius and madness, dreams and nightmares of technological progress, Labatut produces a substance that evokes awe—and sometimes fear—where the lines betwixt world and phantasy blur and intertwine.

Born successful Rotterdam, Netherlands, successful 1980 and raised successful The Hague, Labatut present lives and writes successful Lima, Chile. Mysterious, reclusive, and highly translated, helium has already received galore planetary awards for his work. His book, When We Cease to Understand the World, was a finalist for the 2021 Booker International Prize, included successful Barack Obama’s summertime speechmaking list, and named Book of the Year by publications specified arsenic The Guardian, The New York Times, and New Statesman.

In When We Cease to Understand the World, subject becomes literature, essays crook into fiction, and biographies morph into imagination. What is that threatening shadiness that lingers down the airy of technological knowledge? From H. P. Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick, and from David Hilbert to Kurt Gödel and chaos theory, successful The Stone of Madness, Labatut confronts the instrumentality of the demons of irrationality successful a satellite that seems irrevocably incomprehensible. His 2023 book, MANIAC, recounts the communicative of John von Neumann, 1 of the top geniuses of the 20th century, delving into the acheronian foundations and myths of our modern satellite and the emerging epoch of artificial intelligence. It explores the nightmares calved from the brainsick dreams of logic, narrating the communicative of the caller deity created by humans, which present threatens to regenerate them.

What makes Labatut’s penning process truthful unsocial is that it is profoundly research-driven: “I’m not peculiarly acrophobic with the signifier of stories; it’s each astir research. I effort to observe things. For me, uncovering idiosyncratic else’s operation is much important than reasoning it up myself. That’s the portion I enjoy. In that sense, penning present resembles much walking and picking things up from the crushed than constructing a story.”

The dreams, delirium, and exaggerations successful Labatut’s books intersect with our reality, and that enactment seems truthful delicate. “What fascinates maine is delirium, the brainsick dreams of logic, and the excesses of thought. I americium drawn to contradictions that torment america and astatine the aforesaid clip enlighten us. I americium funny successful chaos, the aimless, the irrational, the random, and the infinite.”