Lannan Readings & Conversations

Eduardo Galeano

with Lawrence Weschler
Wednesday April 22 1999

Lawrence Weschler. Photo by Don Usner. Eduardo Galeano, born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1940 is an essayist, journalist, historian, and activist. Galeano's books include the trilogy Memory of Fire; The Book of Embraces; We Say No; and Walking Words. Galeano, who received the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, has said, "I'm trying to create a synthesis of all different ways of expressing life and reality…I tried to find a way of recounting history so that the reader would feel that it was happening right now, just around the corner—this immediacy, this intensity, which is the beauty and the reality of history." Galeano's Mirrors: An Almost Universal History (Espejos: una historia casi universal) will be published in English by Nation Books in the spring of 2009.

Eduardo Galeano Bio and Cross Links


Lawrence Weschler. Photo by Don Usner. Lawrence Weschler was for over twenty years a staff writer at The New Yorker where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers. His most recent work is Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences . Weschler, awarded a Lannan Award for Nonfiction in 1999, is currently director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

Lawrence Weschler Bio and Cross Links