Join the Forum for the Academy and the Public for a series of panels that will consider the global perception of the United States. In collaboration with the Los Angles Review of Books (LARB), international authors and journalists will offer perspectives on the American identity in the 21st century.
This series follows the 2017 symposium “Who Do We Think We Are?” That event considered self-perceptions of the American Democratic ideal in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election. This year’s series will widen the focus to reflect on the perceptions of our global friends and neighbors.
Each event will be an hour long, beginning with a 15-minute moderated Q&A with our first writer, followed by 15 minutes of audience Q&A. This will be followed by a 15-minute response from our second writer, then more general Q&A
The first event will be held on Tuesday, October 13, 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Register here: http://bit.ly/WHOWEARE1013
Boris Dralyuk, award-winning Executive Editor of LARB, will moderate a conversation with acclaimed Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin, author of the popular Rebus series. This will be followed by special comment by journalist, BBC radio broadcaster and book author Isabel Hilton, who presented on Chinese environmental issues as a panelist at the Forum’s 2018 Fire & Ice symposium on narratives of climate change.
Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, World Literature Today, The Yale Review, New England Review, Harvard Review, Jewish Quarterly, Poetry International, and other journals. He is the author of Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012) and translator of several volumes from Russian and Polish, including Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018). He received first prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition and, with Irina Mashinski, first prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. In 2020 he received the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly.
Ian Rankin is the author of the acclaimed The Rebus series. The first Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses was published in 1987. The Rebus novels are a series of crime novels centered on Detective Inspector John Rebus. In 2004, Ian won America’s celebrated Edgar Award for Resurrection Men, the thirteenth book in the series. The Rebus series is now translated into twenty-two languages and the books are bestsellers on several continents. Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005. Ian received an OBE in 2002 for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his wife and two sons.
Isabel Hilton is a London-based international journalist and broadcaster. She studied at the Beijing Foreign Language and Culture University and at Fudan University in Shanghai before taking up a career in written and broadcast journalism, working for The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Guardian, and the New Yorker. She is a columnist for The Guardian and her work has appeared in the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Granta, the New Statesman, El Pais, Index on Censorship, and many other publications. She is the author and coauthor of several books and is founder, editor, and CEO of chinadialogue.net, a non-profit, fully bilingual online publication based in London, Beijing, and Delhi that focuses on the environment and climate change. Hilton holds two honorary doctorates and was awarded the OBE for her work in raising environmental awareness in China.
