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Citizen of the World or Migrant? The Writer Relocates
A panel discussion featuring Peter Carey, Gita Mehta and Edmund White

New York, N.Y. - The Barnard Forum on Migration continues its fall 2000 program with a panel discussion, titled Citizen of the World or Migrant? The Writer Relocates, featuring Peter Carey, Gita Mehta, and Edmund White, Thursday November 16, 2000, at 7 p.m., McIntosh Student Center, Broadway and 117th Street. The panel will be moderated by Leonard Lopate.

Writers have always utilized the inherent mobility of their profession by traveling from one country to another; either to research to gain a better perspective on their home country, or to relocate and begin the process of becoming an adjunct to another national literature. Whether it be Ibsen in Italy, Conrad in England, or Joyce in Switzerland, such migrations appear to be increasingly commonplace.

This distinguished panel of writers Peter Carey, Gita Mehta and Edmund White chaired by Leonard Lopate will discuss the subject of literary migration and the effect that such itinerance has had upon their own work.

Panelists:

Peter Carey

Australian-born Peter Carey began publishing his fiction in the late 1970s. He was awarded the Book of the Year Award in 1985 and 1994, and the Booker McConnell Prize for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988. In 1990 Carey moved to New York City where he completed The Tax Inspector (1991) and wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) and Jack Maggs (1997) and, soon to be published from Knopf, The True History of the Kelly Gang. The Wall Street Journal wrote of Jack Maggs: "In an audacious and wholly successful act of writerly reinvention, Carey turns Dickens upside down.... Carey's great achievement here is to superimpose so many different levels of meaning onto this relatively straightforward story. Without ever descending into postmodernist boredom, he crafts a quintessentially postmodern tale, in which the novel we are reading is also the novel whose creation we are reading about." Peter Carey is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He currently lives in New York City.

Gita Mehta

Gita Mehta is the author of two novels, Raj and The River Sutra, and two works of nonfiction, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East and Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India. Her books have been translated into 13 languages and published in 27 countries. Vanity Fair wrote of The River Sutra: "With imaginative lushness and narrative elan, Mehta provides a novel that combines Indian storytelling with thoroughly modern perceptions into the nature of love--love both carnal and sublime, treacherous and redeeming. " Mehta has also written, produced, and directed a number of documentaries for American and European television as well as written for numerous Indian, European and American magazines. Born in Delhi, Mehta was educated in India and at Cambridge. She now lives in New York City, London, and India.

Edmund White

Edmund White's fiction includes the autobiographical trilogy A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, as well as Caracole, Forgetting Elena and The Married Man. The New York Times Book Review wrote about his novel A Boy's Own Story: "Edmund White has crossed J. D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde to create an extraordinary novel." Dr. White has taught literature and creative writing at Yale, John Hopkins, New York University and Columbia, was a full professor of English at Brown, and served as executive director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He now teaches at Princeton. In 1999 he was made an Officier de l''Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Born in Cincinnati and a former resident of Paris, France, White now lives in New York City.

Leonard Lopate

Leonard Lopate is one of the most distinguished broadcasters in American public media. As the host of WNYC's popular afternoon show, New York & Company, he has interviewed many of today's most important writers, actors, presidents, dancers, scientists, comedians, historians, curators, filmmakers and do-it-yourself experts. Lopate's distinct conversational and personal style relies on live interaction: "I think it's crucial to maintain eye contact when you're discussing complex matters with the likes of John Updike, Doris Lessing, Bill Bradley, Mark Morris, and Francis Ford Coppola.", says Lopate of his interviewing style.

Citizen of the World or Migrant? The Writer Relocates is part of the Barnard Forum on Migration, which sponsors special events including lectures, readings, and films exploring issues connected to the movement of people from one part of the world to another. Each year, the Forum hosts distinguished writers and academics who address a broad range of issues relating to questions of migration and social order.

The Barnard Forum on Migration is supported by a bequest establishing the Weiss International Fellowship Fund to bring distinguished scholars in literature and the arts to Barnard. The forum is organized by Caryl Phillips, a prize-winning novelist and the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order. Phillips is the author of six novels, many of them exploring the issues of migration. His latest non-fiction work, The Atlantic Sound, published this month, explores the complex notion of what constitutes "home".

The next Barnard Forum on Migration presentation will be at 5:30 p.m., November 30, 2000, Sulzberger Parlor, Barnard Hall, and is titled Survivors of the Middle Passage: Autobiographical Accounts of Enslaved Africans in British America, a discussion led by Jerome S. Handler, senior fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Contact: Petra Tuomi, Public Affairs, 212-854-7907 and Elizabeth Kilstein, Public Affairs, 212-854-2037