PinT Book Club 23rd session

Welcome to the 23rd meeting of PinT Book Club! Join us to discuss A Girl is Lost in Her Century Looking for Her Father by Portuguese author Gonçalo M. Tavares and translated by Daniel Hahn, who will join us for the session. The English translation was published in 2025 by Dalkey Archive Press. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese). See interpretation details below.

To ensure we can pay our collaborators without relying solely on external funding, we are now charging a £6.00 attendance fee per session. You’ll receive a full refund if you cancel up to 24 hours before the session. We hope this fee is affordable for everyone; however, if your circumstances don’t allow you to pay it, please contact us via our website.

Doors will open at 18.50, so we can start promptly at 19.00h. Nearer the time, we'll send you the Zoom link via email.

About the book

Amid a landscape of rubble, skeletal figures, and helplessness in Europe post-World War II, a girl and a man wander among the ruins.

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Hanna, a 12-year-old girl with Down's Syndrome, is looking for her father. Marius, her companion, seems to be hiding from something. Aided by a simple instruction card, Hanna explores what it is to be human, as Tavares creates an abstract yet touching portrait of the true victims of war.

Gonçalo M. Tavares was born in Luanda in 1970 and teaches Theory of Science in Lisbon. His work has already received an impressive amount of literary awards, among them the Prix Littéraire Européen, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger 2010, which has so far been given to authors like Salman Rushdie, John Updike, and Philip Roth. Other awards include the Saramago Prize, the Prémio Portugal Telecom de Literatura em Língua Portuguesa, the SPA Author's Prize, the Prémio Melhor Narrativa Ficcional da Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores and the Prémio Literário Fundação Inês de Castro.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) with about eighty books published to date. His translations from Portuguese include novels by José Eduardo Agualusa, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Carola Saavedra, Paulo Scott and Julián Fuks; children's books by Socorro Acioli and Roger Mello; as well as non-fiction, plays and (very occasionally, and under duress) poetry. His work has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among others. He’s a former chair of the UK's Translators Association and one of the founding committee members of PELTA.

Praise for A GIRL IS LOST IN HER CENTURY LOOKING FOR HER FATHER:

"Gonçalo M. Tavares is a great writer who continues the best models of the European literary tradition. He is both masterful and original. You recognise his unique perspective and style from the first page of his every novel. One of the very few writers in the world who can construct a parabolic story"

— Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

"Gonçalo Tavares’ literature fascinates me with his brilliant paradoxes: he is an author who is indomitable and rational, ironic and profound, singular and approachable, demanding of himself and at the same time irresistibly amusing. His writing is a happy trigger for readers’ intelligence."

— Irene Vallejo

"Gonçalo M. Tavares is a magician of the Portuguese novel […]. This book is a battle against oblivion that Tavares leads in his own way, in a fictional Game of the Goose which is as chilling as it is thrilling."

— L’Obs

"A picaresque novel, a dreamlike fable about a Europe in tension."

— Le Vif / L’Express

"Gonçalo M. Tavares is a writer who is unlike any you’ve read before."

— The New Yorker

"With great beauty and skill, Tavares narrates a fantastic story. One of the most striking books in recent European literature."

— Le Monde

"The symbolic and the bizarre are constantly intertwined in this philosophical tale, where the weight of history acts like a magnet on the footsteps of our two lost friends. Once you’ve closed the book, you won’t stop thinking about it."

— La Vie