Author on Tour: Jakuta Alikavazovic

About Jakuta Alikavazovic

Jakuta Alikavazovic was born in Paris to a family of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. Her parents settled in France in the early 1970’s and Jakuta Alikavazovic was brought up bilingual, with close ties to her Bosnian and Montenegrin relatives. In 2008, she was awarded the prestigious Goncourt Prize for a first novel and more recently, the Médicis Prize for non-fiction with her latest work Like A Sky Inside (Comme un ciel en nous, Stock; trans. by Daniel Levin Becker, Fern Books, 2024). She is also a columnist for the French newspaper Libération and the translator into French of authors including Toni Morrison and Daniel Forster Wallace.

About Like A Sky Inside

(trans. by Daniel Levin Becker, Fern Books, 2024)

In March 2020, Jakuta Alikavazovic spends a night in the Louvre Museum. At home: her nine-month-old son. In her overnight bag: a notebook, a toiletry kit, a duvet, a cube of nougat, and something that shouldn’t be there. In her head: memories of the Venus de Milo, of land art and the American road, of romance and travel and immigration and war – and of her father, who after each of their many visits to the Louvre would ask just how she’d go about stealing the Mona Lisa. Like A Sky Inside is an insightful and heartfelt meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of art, on parenthood and the betrayals of growing up, on foreignness and belonging, and on the secret conversations between our souls and the places that linger in our dreams.

Like A Sky Inside was released in the United States in March 2024.

Find more information here.

Program

Jakuta Alikavazovic will be on tour in the US in May 2024.

Her public program will include:

• Thursday, May 2: conversation with Anna Wiener @ City Lights (San Francisco, CA) – event in English;
• Friday, May 3: conversation @ Alliance Française San Francisco (San Francisco, CA) – event in French;
• Saturday, May 4: conversation @ Third Place Books (Seattle, WA) – event in English;
• Monday, May 6: conversation with Carole Geneix @ Lost City Books (Washington DC) – event in English;
• Wednesday, May 8: conversation with Katie Kitamura and Lila Azam Zanganeh @ McNally Jackson Soho (New York, NY) – event in English;
• Thursday, May 9: conversation with Ben Lerner @ Albertine (New York, NY) – event in English.

For more information, please email Valentine Richet at valentine.richet@villa-albertine.org.