VIENNA HUMANITIES FESTIVAL
PROGRAMM
CAN SCIENCE PROVIDE THE ANSWER TO CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES?
PAOLO GIORDANO IN CONVERSATION WITH KIRSTY LANG
SONNTAG, 01.10. 2023 / 14h00,
AKADEMIE DER BILDENDEN KÜNSTE WIEN, AULA
PAOLO GIORDANO is a polymath: a physicist, novelist and a public intellectual who finds “comfort in maths.” He is the youngest writer ever to win Italy’s prestigious literary award, the Premio Strega prize for fiction. His first novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, sold one million copies worldwide and was translated into over thirty languages.
Giordano was one of the first writers to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, with an influential book-length essay written in the middle of the first Italian lockdown. His latest novel, Tasmania, is about climate change and our fear of losing control. The protagonist is a young man who once believed that science would provide him with all the answers but finds himself faced with a wall of questions. In conversation with the BBC’s KIRSTY LANG, Giordano will explore the increasingly complex relationship between science, literature and society.
© PIERLUCA ESPOSITO
Paolo Giordano is an Italian writer. With his debut novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, he was the youngest ever winner of Premio Strega. His last novel, Tasmania, was selected as best book of 2022 by a jury of the cultural supplement of Il Corriere della Sera. Giordano's activities include non-fiction, like his book How Contagion Works, journalism, and reportage. He also works as a screenwriter (including for the HBO series We Are Who We Are and the movie Drought). Giordano has a PhD in theoretical particle physics and lives in Rome.