Fill 2023: Roots

(This is a past event and is no longer running)

Thea Lenarduzzi & Yara Rodrigues Fowler

Archives are far from being neutral, fair, and fixed. In their novels, Thea Lenarduzzi and Yara Rodrigues Fowler interrogate ancestry, familial relationships and the ways in which politics and migration can shape the history of an individual, in an effort to re-establish their own personal archive. Set respectively between Italy and England, and between England and Brazil, each story maps out cultural legacies and traumas, connecting larger political events to the personal and particular intergenerational struggle.

Chair: Maddalena Vatti

This event is in English

Thea Lenarduzzi is a writer, editor and broadcaster, primarily for the Times Literary Supplement. She is the presenter of the FILL-produced podcast The Italian Files. Dandelions, winner of the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, is her first book.

Yara Rodrigues Fowler grew up in South London. Her first novel, Stubborn Archivist, was published in 2019 and it was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2020 and the Desmond Elliot Prize 2019. Her second novel, there are more things, was published in April 2022 and nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022 and Goldsmiths Prize 2022. It was one of the Sunday Times, BBC Culture and New Statesman’s books of the Year. Yara is also a part-time climate justice organiser.

Maddalena Vatti is a book scout, writer and one of the organisers of FILL.