HIGHLIGHTING
THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted November 22, 2017)
Italian Institute
of Culture’s director Francesca Chiesa will be leaving Kenya at the year’s end.
But as her parting gift to the country, she just organized a Kenyan writers’
workshop on the Historical Novel.
Aiming to
encourage young Kenyans not just to write their own historical novels but also
to learn more about Kenyan history itself, Dr Chiesa opened the four-day workshop
last Monday at the Stanley Hotel by underscoring the importance of writers,
especially those who can tell captivating stories against the backdrop of their
country’s history.
“The
function of the writer is to preserve a people’s memory,” she said.
To make her
perspective practical, she’d invited three Italian intellectuals to share ideas
about their experience with the historical novel and history generally.
Carlo A.
Martigli had been a banker before becoming a best-selling historical novelist
whose book ‘999, the last Guardian’ sold more than a million copies and was translated
into several languages. His role in the workshop was to offer clear simple tips
on how to structure one’s historical novel and create compelling characters
within the context of a major historical moment.
Matteo Ogliari
is an historian who shared his experience using Kenya’s National Archives and
MacMillan Library to research his doctoral dissertation and showed the Kenyans
how useful archives and libraries can be in constructing their own historical
novels.
Finally, Giacomo
Brunoro, with former classmates from University of Padua, organized a whole
cultural festival around the historical novel. Their ‘Chronicae Festival Internationale del Romanzo Storico’ is actually
the second cultural festival that Giacomo cofounded with friends. The first was
the Sugar Pulp Festival.
In both
cases, their ambition has been to promote their home region in and around Padua
as well as to create vibrant multi-faceted and multi-media festivals that
amplify various aspects of literature and culture. Sugar Pulp’s focus is contemporary
pop culture while Chronicae’s is historical fiction.
Sugar Pulp itself
is the name of Giacomo’s brand, with the ‘sugar’ deriving from the beetroot
that’s plentiful in their semi-rural region and the ‘pulp’ alluding to popular
culture, such as the film ‘pulp fiction’.
Launched
humbly in 2011 once he’d returned to Padua after years working in broadcast,
print and online media in Milan, Giacomo’s vision for the Sugar Pulp Festival
is for it to one day become as big, multicultural and global as the Edinburgh
Festival in Scotland.
He’s got a
similar dream for the Chronicae Festival even though it’s more specialized than
Sugar Pulp’s which covers all facets of pop culture. During its festival, Super
Pulp explores everything from comic books, paperback books, audiobooks and
ebooks to video games, films TV, live performance and virtual reality.
Sugar Pulp
only launched its Historical Novel ‘Chronicae’ Festival in 2014. But it’s
already drawn internationally-acclaimed novelists from around Italy, elsewhere
in Europe and the States to take part in the festival. They are all writers who
believe, like Francesca, that knowing one’s history is of vital importance but
the most enjoyable way to imbibe that history is through the fictional form.
One reason
Giacomo agreed with his friends to establish Chronicae was because Italians
have a large appetite for cultural festivals. “But we saw there was a gap to be
filled among the literary festivals. There was none before ours that focused solely
on the historical novel,” he said.
Another
reason Sugar Pulp was bound to create a Chronicae platform was because one of
its co-founders, Matteo Strukul is himself a writer of historical novels. His
trilogy on the Medici family of Florence is award-winning and is already being
translated into English, Spanish, and German.
Both Sugar
Pulp and Chronicae have vibrant online presences. And while their presence on
social media is virtually all in Italian, the example that Giacomo sets for
promoting culture and the historical novel is inspirational. So is his passion
specifically for Italian culture.
As her last
parting project to Kenyans, Francesca created a literary competition during the
workshop. The participants were given the challenge of writing an historical
novelette which will be judged by her and her three Italian guests.
“The winner
will received a round-trip ticket, including accommodations, to Italy where he
or she will be guest of honor in April 2018 during the next Chronicae
Festival,” she said.
At the time
of our going to press, the winner had not yet been named. But clearly,
Francesca leaves Kenya having made a powerful mark on the minds of a score of young
Kenyan writers, which is no small feat.
No comments:
Post a Comment