Conversations from the Cullman Center: Álvaro Enrigue and Rivka Galchen

Álvaro Enrigue and Rivka Galchen talk about his new novel, Sudden Death, which centers on a 16th century tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn.

Álvaro Enrigue is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. He was a Fellow at the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies, and has taught at NYU, Princeton, and the University of Maryland. Sudden Death is his seventh book and the second to be translated into English. It won Spain’s prestigious Herralde Prize and Mexico’s Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award. Enrigue worked on Sudden Death while in residence at the Cullman Center in 2011-12.

Rivka Galchen is the author of the story collection American Innovations and the novel Atmospheric Disturbances, which won the William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction Writing. Her next story collection, Little Labors, will be published in May 2016. Galchen was a Cullman Center Fellow in 2009-10. The New Yorker named her to its list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010.

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