Humanities Symposium: Displacement and Belonging
Event Information
Theme: Displacement and BelongingKeynote Address: An American Story: War, Memory, and Erasure
Thursday, March 16, 2023
McGuire Hall
6:30 p.m.
Award-winning novelist Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine (Knopf) is this year's Humanities Symposium text. This novel, set during World War II, follows a Japanese-American family from their home in Berkeley, California to internment camps in the Utah desert. Otsuka draws on historical research as well as her own family's history to create a spare and imagistic novel told in an inventive style. The novel won the 2003 Asian American Literary Award and the 2003 American Library Association Alex Award.
Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf) was a finalist for the National Book Award 2011, won the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2011 Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. The Buddha in the Attic was an international bestseller and the winner of the prestigious Prix Femina 茅tranger 2012, and the Albatros Literaturpreis 2013. Otsuka's third novel, The Swimmers, was published by Knopf in 2022.