“Between Borders: Moroccan Migrations in L'últim Patriarca By

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“Between Borders: Moroccan Migrations in L’últim patriarca by Najat El-Hachmi” A Lecture by Kathleen McNerney Prize-winning translator of women’s writing from Catalonia Wednesday April 24, 2019 4pm 1301 Rolfe Hall, UCLA Born in Morocco in 1979, Najat El Hachmi immigrated with her family to the Barcelona area when she was a child. She attended Catalan schools and then studied Arabic literature at the University of Barcelona. Her first book, Jo també sóc catalana (2004), is autobiographical, dealing with issues of identity and belonging in a new place. In 2008, the novel L’últim patriarca won the very prestigious Ramon Llull Prize for Catalan Literature and was soon translated into English. Mare de llet i mel is her most recent work. Kathleen McNerney is professor emerita of Spanish and Women’s Studies at West Virginia University, where she was Benedum Distinguished Scholar and Singer Professor of the Humanities. She has awarded several prizes in Catalonia for her work, including the Premi Batista i Roca from the Institut de Projecció Exterior. Her work includes Latin American, Castilian, and French literatures, but focuses on Catalan women authors. She is coeditor of Double Minorities of Spain (MLA 1994) and Visions and Revisions: Women’s Narrative in Twentieth-Century Spain (Rodopi 2008). She has also edited collections of essays on Mercè Rodoreda and is translator of stories, poetry, and four novels. Her latest publication is Silent Souls and Other Stories (MLA 2018) by Caterina Albert, which has just been awarded the translation prize by the North American Catalan Society. In her talk, McNerney will focus on Najat El Hachmi’s novels. She will also refer to the works of Laila Lalami, also an immigrant from Morocco, whose trajectory has been quite different from El Hachmi, but who deals with many of the same issues..

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'Jo També Sóc Catalana' by Najat El Hachmi
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