In Conversation: John M. Coetzee with Fabián Martinez Siccardi

Join us to hear Nobel Laureate John Coetzee interviewing Argentinian writer Fabián Martinez Siccardi about his fiction, translations and journalism, which focus on the southern-most region of South America, Patagonia.

Fabián Martinez Siccardi was born in Patagonia, Argentina. His novel, Bestias afuera, set in that region, received Argentina’s Clarín Award for Best Novel in 2013. He has published several books in Spanish (Patagonia iluminada, Perdidas en la noche, Los hombres más altos, and Margot en el lago Cardiel). His two autobiographical essays in English, Patagonian Fox (Zyzzyva, 2018) and Feeling Southern (Granta, 2019), explore his relationship with the Indigenous laborers on his grandparents' estancia, where he spent his childhood summers. In 2023, he produced the podcast Originarios: Muerte y Resurrección to address the genocide of Indigenous people in Argentina in the 19th century and its ongoing consequences. His work has been translated into Portuguese, Italian, Czech, and French.

John Maxwell Coetzee is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist and translator. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and highly decorated authors in the English language, having been awarded the Booker Prize twice and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. In recent years Coetzee has indicated a radical literary and cultural realignment, shifting the centre of attention in world literature, political philosophy and the creative arts toward the southern hemisphere.