Pedro Mairal

Pedro Mairal’s 2015 collection of columns and essays, Maniobras de evasión, examines his own writing life, both in Buenos Aires and as a frequent traveller.

In his readings and conversations with writers and academics in Australia, visiting writer Mairal focused on the intersection of creative subjects and life, from literary prizes to bus accidents and fatherhood, and engaged with the dark corners of the creative mind to present his own writing as a method of survival.

Pedro Mairal is an Argentinian novelist, travel writer, poet, screenwriter and television presenter whose work has been translated and published across five continents. He has authored a collection of short fiction, three volumes of poetry, a collection of newspaper columns and five novels, including El gran surubi, which is composed entirely of sonnets, and The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, which was named a 2013 book of the year by The New Republic, along with work by Julian Barnes and George Saunders. In 2007, Bogata39 named him one of the finest Latin American writers of his generation. He is a writer whose work, in the words of American art editor Jed Perl, “moves from the ordinary to the opulent and back again without skipping a beat.”

Mairal’s position as writer in residence and visiting research fellow was sponsored by the ARC Discovery Project “Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature”, a partnership between Western Sydney University and the University of Adelaide.

Copy of readings read at Adelaide event 17 October 2017

Short Story read in Sydney 20 October 2017

Images of Pedro Mairal in Australia