For more information, images, quotes and interview requests DESIGNS STRUCTURE FOR NEW please contact: PERFORMANCE WORK CURATED BY ADAM THIRLWELL Erica Bolton WITH Bolton & Quinn +44 (0)20 7221 5000 Leading authors from Chile, Croatia, Iceland, Japan, Kenya, Martinique and Palestine will [email protected] perform new works for Studio Créole, a new performance work curated by award-winning Sim Eldem author Adam Thirlwell in collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist. Bolton & Quinn +44 (0)20 7221 5000 Co-commissioned by MIF and Carriageworks, Sydney, Studio Créole will have its world [email protected] premiere at Manchester Academy 1 from 12–14 July, performed in a specially designed structure by international architect Rem Koolhaas. Daisy Taylor Bolton & Quinn The seven authors have been commissioned to write seven new short stories, which they will +44 (0)20 7221 5000 read aloud in their original language to a live audience. The stories will be simultaneously [email protected] translated into English and interpreted by an actor on stage, resulting in a unique live mif.co.uk performance that explores language, interpretation and globalisation.

The authors are Adania Shibli (reading in Palestinian Arabic), Alejandro Zambra (reading in Chilean Spanish), Dubravka Ugrešić (reading in Croatian), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (reading in Kikuyu), Patrick Chamoiseau (reading in French/Antillean Creole), Sayaka Murata (reading in Japanese) and Sjón (reading in Icelandic). Page 1 of 5 Studio Créole will be performed in a set by Rem Koolhaas, whose world-leading practice Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has designed The Factory, the cultural space being developed in Manchester, which will be operated by MIF.

Hans Ulrich Obrist said: “Studio Créole is an exhibition about bridge building between

languages and continents. It is an experimental group show curated with the celebrated

novelist and writer Adam Thirlwell and the visionary architect Rem Koolhaas who began his career as a writer. The exhibition is about the ‘creolisation’ of the world and hence is a homage to the late Édouard Glissant who considered the blend of languages and cultures a decisive characteristic of Antillean identity. Studio Créole is about celebrating a world of many languages. In the words of writer and artist Etel Adnan, ‘Thankfully, we are living after Babel, in a world of many languages that we can all move between. Our deepest identity is created from an infinite number of things, and every language is the door to a whole world.’”

Adam Thirlwell said: “With Studio Créole, we want to stage world literature literally – to put it on stage in all its multilingual complexity, and with all the drama inherent in live interpretation. One of the paradoxes of literature that’s always fascinated me is that it’s an international art form which uses the nationalistic medium of language. It’s really exciting to be bringing this poly-linguistic project to Manchester – which is itself such a cosmopolitan city.”

John McGrath, MIF Artistic Director and Chief Executive said: “This is the first time at MIF

that we have put literature, authors and their stories at the heart of a project. It’s also a project that, particularly in the political moment we’re in, celebrates the complexity of a multi-lingual world and the beauty of the many languages of that world. The creative team have created a unique environment into which seven of the world’s most extraordinary writers will step and present their work in a way that has never been presented before.”

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Studio Créole is commissioned by Manchester International Festival and Carriageworks, Sydney. Produced by Manchester International Festival. MIF19, which runs from 4–21 July For more information, images, quotes and 2019 with artists from across the globe premiering a variety of new work in spaces interview requests throughout the city. For more details about this year’s programme, please visit mif.co.uk. please contact: Images can be downloaded here: http://press.mif.co.uk/mif19/ Erica Bolton Bolton & Quinn Listings +44 (0)20 7221 5000 Studio Créole [email protected] Manchester Academy 1, Oxford Road, M13 9PR

Friday 12 – Sunday 14 July, 7.30pm Sim Eldem Bolton & Quinn Tickets £25, £20 concessions / £10 for Greater Manchester residents on a lower wage +44 (0)20 7221 5000 mif.co.uk / +44 (0) 333 320 2890 [email protected] Ends Daisy Taylor Bolton & Quinn NOTES TO EDITORS +44 (0)20 7221 5000 [email protected] About Manchester International Festival Manchester International Festival (MIF) is the world’s first festival of original, new work and mif.co.uk special events, staged every two years in Manchester, UK. MIF launched in 2007 as an artist-led festival presenting new works from across the spectrum of performing arts, visual arts and popular culture. The next Festival takes place from 4 – 21 July 2019.

MIF has commissioned, produced and presented world premieres by artists including Page 2 of 5 Marina Abramović, Damon Albarn, Björk, Boris Charmatz, Jeremy Deller, Elbow, Wayne McGregor, Steve McQueen, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Thomas Ostermeier, Maxine Peake, Punchdrunk, The xx, Robert Wilson and Architects.

These and other world-renowned artists from different art forms and backgrounds create dynamic, innovative and forward-thinking new work, staged in venues across Greater Manchester – from theatres, galleries and concert halls to railway depots, churches and car parks. MIF works closely with venues, festivals and other cultural organisations globally, whose financial and creative input helps to make many of these projects possible and

ensures that work made at MIF goes on to be seen around the world.

MIF supports a year-round Creative Engagement programme, bringing opportunities for people from all backgrounds, ages and from all corners of the city to get involved during the Festival and year-round, as volunteers, as participants in shows, through skills development workshops and a host of creative activities, such as Festival in My House.

MIF will also be the operator for The Factory, the new world-class cultural space being developed in the heart of Manchester, designed by internationally-renowned architects Rem Koolhaas’ OMA. Due to open in 2021, The Factory will commission, present and produce a year-round programme, featuring new work from the world’s greatest artists and offering a space to make, explore and experiment. Attracting up to 850,000 visitors, The Factory will add £1.1 billion to the economy and create 1,500 jobs. Its pioneering programme of skills, training and engagement will benefit local people and the next generation of creative talent from across the city, whilst apprenticeships and trainee schemes are already underway during the construction phase.

MIF’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive is John McGrath.

MIF is a registered charity and company limited by guarantee. mif.co.uk

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For more information, images, quotes and Adam Thirlwell interview requests Adam Thirlwell (London 1978) is the author of three novels, Politics, The Escape, and Lurid please contact: & Cute; a novella, Kapow!; and Multiples, a project with international novels. His work has been translated into 30 languages. He is the winner of the EM Forster Award from the Erica Bolton American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Somerset Maugham Award; and has Bolton & Quinn twice been nominated as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His criticism +44 (0)20 7221 5000 appears in the Guardian, The New York Times and the New York Review of Books. He is the [email protected] London editor of the Paris Review.

Sim Eldem Bolton & Quinn Rem Koolhaas +44 (0)20 7221 5000 Rem Koolhaas (Rotterdam, 1944) founded Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in [email protected] 1975 together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and . He graduated from the Architectural Association in London and in 1978 published : A Daisy Taylor Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In 1995, his book S,M,L,XL summarized the work of Bolton & Quinn OMA in "a novel about architecture". He co-heads the work of both OMA and AMO, the +44 (0)20 7221 5000 research branch of OMA, operating in areas beyond the realm of architecture. His built [email protected] work includes the National Library and the Headquarters (2018), Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris (2018), Fondazione in Milan (2015/2018), mif.co.uk Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), (2004), and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003). Current projects include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester. Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, is a Page 3 of 5 professor at Harvard University, and is preparing a major exhibition for the Guggenheim museum to open in 2019 entitled Countryside: Future of the World.

Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 250 shows. Obrist was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 2009 and received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence in 2011. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions and is contributing editor to several magazines and journals.

His recent publications include Lives of Artists, Lives of Architects, Ways of Curating, A Brief

History of Curating, Do It: The Compendium and The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar.

Adania Shibli Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974. She has been named one of the “Beirut39”, a list of the best Arab writers under 40, and has twice been awarded the Palestinian Young Writer’s Award by the A.M. Qattan Foundation for her novels Touch and We Are All Equally Far from Love. Her play The Error was staged at the Tristan Bates Theatre, London, and as part of the New Works festival at the New World Theatre in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her novel Minor Detail will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions next year.

Alejandro Zambra Alejandro Zambra is a Chilean writer, poet and critic. Born in Santiago in 1975, he is of a generation of Chilean writers whose work explores the contested space of the trauma inherited from the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He is the author of My

Documents, a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and three

previous novels: Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai. His books have been translated into twenty languages and have received several international prizes.

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His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, and McSweeney’s, among others. In 2010, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young For more information, images, quotes and Spanish-Language Novelists, and he was a 2015–16 Cullman Center fellow at the New York interview requests Public Library. please contact: Dubravka Ugresic Erica Bolton Over the past three decades, Dubravka Ugresic has established herself as one of Europe’s Bolton & Quinn most distinctive novelists and essayists. From her early postmodernist writing to her fiction +44 (0)20 7221 5000 and essays on the disintegration of her Yugoslav homeland and the fall of the Berlin Wall, [email protected] through to her recent writings on popular and literary culture, Ugresic’s work is marked by a

rare combination of irony, polemic, and compassion. In 1991 when war broke out in the Sim Eldem Bolton & Quinn former Yugoslavia, Ugresic took a firm anti-war stance, critically dissecting retrograde +44 (0)20 7221 5000 Croatian and Serbian nationalism. Subjected to prolonged public ostracism and persistent [email protected] media harassment, she left Croatia in 1993. In an exile that has in time become emigration, her books have been translated into over twenty languages. She has taught at a number of Daisy Taylor American and European universities, including Harvard, UCLA, Columbia and the Free Bolton & Quinn University of Berlin. She is the winner of several major literary prizes: Austrian State Prize for +44 (0)20 7221 5000 European Literature 1998; finalist of Man Booker International Prize 2009; Jean Améry Essay [email protected] Prize, awarded for her essayistic work as a whole, 2012; Vilenica Prize 2016; while Karaoke Culture was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism 2011. She is the mif.co.uk winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She currently lives in Amsterdam.

Ngũgi wa Thiong’o Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is an award-winning Kenyan writer who has been publishing work for Page 4 of 5 over 50 years. Currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, he was born in Kenya in 1938. As an adolescent, he lived through the Mau Mau War of Independence, the central historical episode in the making of modern Kenya and a major theme in his early works. He burst onto the literary scene in East Africa with his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962, as part of the celebration of Uganda’s Independence. His memoir Wrestling with the Devil looks back at his year-long imprisonment in 1978, when, after being arrested in the middle of the night, he was held without trial, in a maximum- security prison. The memoir is a trimmer version of the original work, Detained: A Writer’s

Prison Diary (1982).

Patrick Chamoiseau Patrick Chamoiseau was born in 1953 in Martinique, where he currently lives. After studying law in Paris he returned to Martinique and developed a deep interest in Creole culture. He is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books, including Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co- authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. He was a warded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Antan d’enfance, and his novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992 and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Sayaka Murata Sayaka Murata is a best-selling Japanese novelist. She was born in Japan in 1979. Her first novel Breastfeeding won the 2003 Gunzo Prize for New Writers. Her novel Convenience Store People won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for Literature in 2016, and in 2018 became the first of her works to be published in English under the title Convenience Store

Woman.

Sjón

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Born in Reykjavik in 1962, Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic novelist. He won the Nordic Council's Literary Prize for his novel The Blue Fox (the Nordic countries' equivalent of the For more information, images, quotes and Man Booker Prize) and From The Mouth Of The Whale was shortlisted for both the interview requests International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His please contact: novelMoonstone – The Boy Who Never Was was awarded every Icelandic literature prize, including the 2013 Icelandic Literary Prize. His latest work is the definitive edition of the Erica Bolton trilogy CoDex 1962. Also a poet, librettist and lyricist, Sjón has published nine poetry Bolton & Quinn collections, written four opera librettos and lyrics for various artists. In 2001 he was +44 (0)20 7221 5000 nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics in the film Dancer In The Dark. He is the president of [email protected] the Icelandic PEN Centre and former chairman of the board of Reykjavik, UNESCO city of

Literature. His novels have been published in thirty-five languages. Sim Eldem Bolton & Quinn +44 (0)20 7221 5000 Carriageworks [email protected] Carriageworks is the largest and most significant contemporary multi-arts centre of its kind in Australia. Engaging artists and audiences with contemporary ideas and issues, Daisy Taylor Carriageworks presents large-scale immersive programs that are artist led and emerge Bolton & Quinn from Carriageworks’ commitment to reflecting social and cultural diversity. Carriageworks is +44 (0)20 7221 5000 a cultural facility of the NSW Government and is supported by Create NSW and the [email protected] Australian Government through the Australia Council of the Arts. The Artistic Program is ambitious, risk taking and unrelenting in its support of artists. mif.co.uk

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