The presentation, organized by Casa Árabe and the Turner publishing firm, will also include the participation of Spanish writer Lara Moreno and will be presented by César Martínez-Useros, the editor, and Eduardo López Busquets, the General Director of Casa Árabe. The event will take place at 7:00 p.m. at the Casa Árabe Auditorium in Madrid. Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached. 

Fragmentos de Bagdad (Fragments of Baghdad) brings to light an image of the Iraqi capital distant from the stereotypes created in recent years: an open, diverse and cultured city which only constant wars have plunged into a blind radicalism, though traces of reason and hope still remain. 

Yusuf, who lived the best years of Baghdad and seems as melancholy as he is optimistic about the future, and his young niece Maha, whose life has been shaken by terrorist attacks, kidnappings and violence, face off in an impossible argument over the future of their country. Their falling out is nothing more than a symbol of the breakup of an entire people. 

In this novel, Sinan Antoon uses the finest prose and great emotion to deal with the story of the breakdown of a culture at the hands of political madness, and the loss and oblivion of the past, in favor of the current radicalism. 

The son of an Iraqi father and American mother, Mr. Antoon earned his degree in English Literature from the University of Baghdad in 1990, and one year later he moved to the United States due to the Gulf War. At present he is a professor at the Gallatin School of New York University, where he gives classes on modern and pre-modern Arab literature, as well as on contemporary Arab policy and culture. His academic publications have focused on the work of Palestine’s Mahmud Darwish and Iraq’s Sargon Boulus. He recently published “The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014) and is also the author of two books of poetry, one in Arabic and the other in English. His essays and literary texts have been published in numerous American and Arab newspapers and media (New York Times, Aljazeera.net, The Nation, Middle East Report, Journal of Palestine Studies, etc.). Moreover, he is a member of the editorial board of the “Arab Studies Journal” and a co-founder and co-director of the prestigious portal on Arab literature and culture Jadaliyya.  In addition to his activity as a writer and university professor, Antoon has completed a documentary titled On Baghdad, which he filmed in 2003 when he returned to his native city to bear witness to the life of Iraqis in the post-Saddam era, with the occupation.

Fragments of Baghdad is his third novel, for which he was selected to be a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013. 

Studied Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.  She has had two complementary novels published: La ciudad en invierno (The City in Winter, 2007, Caballo de Troya) and La ciudad feliz (The Happy City, 2009, Random House Literature), which earned the Jaén Novel Award and the “Tormenta” Award for best new author and was a finalist for the Dulce Chacón Spanish Narrative Award. She is also the author of a blog called Periferia (www.madridesperiferia.blogspot.com), a “work in progress” on Madrid’s neighborhoods that explores undefined borderline spaces. In 2010,  she was included on a list of the 22 best writers of prose in the Spanish language under the age of 35 by the prestigious magazine Granta. In 2013, she was named one of the Spanish voices with the most promising future by El Cultural magazine.