The second panel presentation to be announced for The Barcelona Conference on Arts, Media & Culture (BAMC2021), held concurrently with The Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE2021) is an interview session titled “Brexit, Borders and the Gibraltarian Voice” with Isabel Alonso-Breto of the University of Barcelona, Spain, and M.G. Sanchez, an independent writer from Gibraltar, UK.
The BCE/BAMC2021 Organising Committees are currently calling for papers to be presented at the joint event. Submit your abstracts by October 8, 2021 to participate. To take advantage of discounted submission fees, submit by the Early Bird Deadline, July 31.
To participate in BCE/BAMC2021 as an audience member, please register for the conference via the conference websites. (Registration for either conference will allow delegates to attend sessions in the other.)
The interview will also be available for IAFOR Members to view online. To find out more, please visit the IAFOR Membership page.
Abstract
In this session Dr Isabel Alonso Breto of the University of Barcelona will be chatting with M. G. Sanchez, Gibraltar’s most well-known novelist. Sanchez – who holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Leeds – is the author of fourteen books with a Gibraltar theme, including six novels (The Escape Artist, Solitude House, Jonathan Gallardo, Diary of a Victorian Colonial, The Fetishist and Gooseman) and three autobiographical memoirs (Past, Bombay Journal and Border Control). Alonso and Sanchez will be discussing borders, Brexit and narrative voices in The Fetishist, the author’s latest novel (due to be published in October 2021), as well as looking at some of the broader challenges and obstacles faced by writers coming from contested micro-territories.
Speaker Profiles
M.G. Sanchez
Independent writer, Gibraltar, United Kingdom
M. G. Sanchez is a Gibraltarian writer based in the UK. He studied at the University of Leeds, where he obtained BA, MA and PhD degrees in English Literature. He is the author of fourteen books, among them novels, journals, memoirs, historical studies and collections of short stories. His writing focuses on Gibraltarian identity politics and on the geopolitical challenges facing the Rock and its inhabitants. He is also interested in borders, Brexit, masculinity, national stereotypes and colonial/post-colonial discourses of “otherness”. More information about his writing can be found at www.mgsanchez.net and www.facebook.com/mgsanchezwriter.
Isabel Alonso-Breto
University of Barcelona, Spain
Dr Isabel Alonso-Breto obtained her PhD from the University of Barcelona in 2003, where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. A scholar in the area of Postcolonial Studies, she has worked on authors of Caribbean, Canadian, Indian and South-African origin, while her present research focuses on literature and life writing by Sri Lankan authors, mostly of the diaspora. A visiting scholar in recent years at the Universities of Toronto (Canada) and Marburg (Germany), Dr Alonso-Breto has been the guest editor of several issues of academic journals such as Coolabah and Indialogs, and is the general editor of the miscellaneous journal Blue Gum. Also interested in the social role of creative writing and translation, she has several pieces to her credit in this regard. Lately she has translated into Spanish the anthology Siembra solo Palabras, by Sri Lankan Tamil poet Cheran, published in 2019. Dr Alonso-Breto is a member of Ratnakara, a research group devoted to the study of the literatures and cultures of the Indian Ocean, and the Vice-Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies at the University of Barcelona.