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Section: Arts
Literary Masters at Buffalo’s Babel
By Emmalie Vance
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Salman Rushdie; courtesy of Just Buffalo.
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Azar Nafisi; photo by S. J. Staniski.
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Ha Jin; courtesy of Just Buffalo.
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A. S. Byatt; photo by Michael Trevillion.
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The goal of Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Babel series is simple, and profound: “We try to bring in people considered to be the best writers in the world,” says Michael Kelleher, artistic director for Just Buffalo, which presents the distinguished international author subscription series known as Babel twice each year.
Babel began as a small idea among the employees of Just Buffalo, and moved onto a piece of paper in the form of a grant request, which was presented to the John R. Oishei Foundation for support. Although Just Buffalo had a long history of working with the foundation on various projects and their long history in Buffalo of supporting the arts, “We still expected them to say no or give only a portion of the money we needed,” says Kelleher, “but they came back almost immediately and funded the whole thing.”
From that point on, Babel has been growing in leaps and bounds. “[Babel] allows people in Buffalo a glimpse of what’s happening in the rest of the world. People love coming,” says Kelleher, “and are proud that we’re able to bring these authors to speak and interact with people.”
Since the series was first presented in fall 2007 with author Orhan Pamuk, Kelleher was just hoping that the audience was going to be big enough that there weren’t too many open seats. That first series sold about 650 subscriptions out of a possible 900. The second season exploded, as the 900 available tickets were completely sold out even before the season began and individual tickets had to be made which sold an additional 500 seats to the event.
In fact, so many people attended the last event that it had to be moved from its original venue at Babeville to one three times the size: Kleinhans Music Hall. Now permanently hosted there, Babel can offer 2,800 subscriptions instead of only 900. Subscriptions last for the year and allow admission for one into each event of that season.
“Before the event,” says Kelleher, “we choose one of the writer’s books and encourage the whole city to read it before they come; a book we think will speak to a lot of people.” The writer then controls the event to an extent, choosing how they would like to spend their 45 minutes.
Talks are followed by an audience question-and-answer session in which Kelleher presents the author with questions from the audience, which have been previously written down on note cards. “It’s obvious that people have read the book,” he says, “because they ask questions about why characters have done certain things, where the idea for the story all began, and so on,” he says. A traditional book signing tops off the evening.
This season’s line up includes Great Britain’s A. S. Byatt, author of Possession: A Romance and winner of the Booker Prize on October 9; China’s Ha Jin, author of Waiting and a National Book Award winner on November 20; Iran’s Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and the recipient of the Worldwide Bestselling Author award on March 5; and India’s Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight’s Children and the winner of the “Booker of Bookers” award on April 16. Subscriptions and more information can be found at www.justbuffalo.org.
“We really wanted to create some kind of a highly visible series that people would be really excited about in Buffalo,” says Kelleher. “So far, [Babel] has exceeded our wildest dreams.”
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