Events and lectures
Currently booking events for 2023
** Accepting invitations to festival, bookshop, community center events for Eighteen Lashes, The Hilltop, and previous books ** [Past events] **
BOOK events in the United States: Contact Ofer Ziv at Lion House Agency
BOOK events in Europe: Contact Rebecca Treves at Elastica Speaker Bureau
BOOK events Anywhere else: Contact through the email box
Current Lectures:
The Hilltop: The Wild West Bank
Gavron speaks about the background, the motives and the practice of researching and writing his novel, The Hilltop
He shows a presentation of photos that he took during his research in the West Bank settlements, explains their history and importance in the current political climate, and shows how and what he saw in his travels evolved into the fiction.
Contemporary Israeli Literature: can you avoid politics?
This lecture examines contemporary Israeli fiction and the role of politics within it. Does life in such a politically-charged environment influence the kind of fiction and other art forms created within it? What is the role of authors in such an environment? Are they expected to deal with it, have an obligation to do so? Or perhaps a burden, a monkey on their back that they are not allowed to escape from?
Through a series of examples and case studies, from his own and his peers' work and experience, he shows how contemporary Israeli writers deal with these and other questions, both in their fiction and beyond it.
Tel Aviv: History, Light and Darkness
In which Gavron starts with talking about the city's conceptualizing as a new kind of a free and culturally-dominated Jewish city and the first years of realizing this concept, then moves to its present status as an ongoing party city that is attracting young people from all over the world and how it achieved this status, and ending with the city's darker side, that has been explored in the Tel Aviv Noir anthology which he has co-edited with Etgar Keret.
Translation - Downtown is not the Center of Town
(or: ass or behind: thoughts and arguments)
Here Gavrons explain the challenges of translation through numerous stories and examples from his long career of translating fiction from English to Hebrew (and twice vice-versa) - over 20 books including works by J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran-Foer and JK Rowling.
What kind of question arise? What kind of arguments did I have with editors? How do you translate purposely incorrect language? Where did he fail and where did he succeed?
Curiosity killed the cat and revived the writer
researching and observing communities to achieve the insider’s viewpoint and vitalize your fiction
Assaf Gavron has written about diverse worlds, some of which were not only foreign to him initially, but also difficult to access and sometimes virtually impenetrable:
The settlers of the West Bank (for his novel “The Hilltop”).
The Israeli movers community in new York (“Moving”).
Refugee camp Palestinians in the West Bank (“Almost Dead”).
Local communities in Jerusalem and their street food favorites (“Eating Standing Up”)
The ultra-religious Jewish community in Postville, Iwoa (work-in-progress).
In this lecture Gavron presents photos and tells tales of his research methods and his many experiences on the ground. He will elaborate on his habit of tapping into worlds foreign to him, and how he blends in, absorbs, and then writes about them. He speaks about curiosity, empathy, forging connections, and the developing of projects.
Gavron’s lecture will interest creative writing, Jewish-studies and political science students, as well as other students, Jewish communities and the general reading public.
He can also offer a creative writing workshop to go along with the subject of the talk.