This year’s Cervantes Forum (“Foro Cervantes”), organised by the University of Oxford and the Instituto Cervantes, features Agustín Sánchez Vidal, an acclaimed Spanish writer, who will give two lectures over the course of two days.
In the first lecture, Agustín Sánchez Vidal will bring his perspective as a novelist, screenwriter and professor of literature and cinema to bear on the fundamental reasons that incite us to tell stories, and to listen to them. Both desires are insatiable, creating a warp of tales that become guardians of our memory and tokens of our identity. Fiction plays an essential role in our lives. From Homeric narratives to Hollywood blockbusters, it enriches and renews our language, the most sensitive structure with which we perceive reality, and which defines us as humans. Fiction transports us from a physical space that we share with other species to a parallel universe that belongs exclusively to us: a symbolic world that holds our ability to imagine alternative realities, to evolve, to choose, and to be free.
Agustín Sánchez Vidal is a Spanish essayist, screenwriter, novelist and academic. His literary works include Bunuel and King Solomon’s Table (2001), The Master Key (2007) and Viñetas (2016), his most recent novel. He lectures on the history of cinema at the University of Zaragoza.
The Cervantes Forum (“Foro Cervantes”) is a collaboration between the University of Oxford and the Instituto Cervantes, which presents renowned Spanish writers to British academia and general public.
The lecture will be in Spanish. Free entrance.
