Author on Tour: Santiago Amigorena

About Santiago Amigorena

Santiago Amigorena is a screenwriter, producer, and author. He has written 14 novels, which have been translated into more than 20 languages. Santiago Amigorena has also worked as a scriptwriter on over 30 feature films, collaborating with notable directors such as Cédric Klapisch, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, Brigitte Rouan, Jean-Pierre Limosin, Agnès Merlet, Idrissa Ouedraogo, and Juan Solanas (Upside Down). His directorial debut, A Few Days in September, was featured in the Official Selection of the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival, and it was distributed worldwide. Santiago Amigorena’s second film, Another Silence was also shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2011 as part of the Venice Days program, and his third film, Les Enfants Rouges, was presented in festivals in Rio and Beirut.

The Ghetto Within (trans. by Frank Wynne, HarperCollins) is Santiago Amigorena’s US debut novel. It was shortlisted for several prestigious literary awards in France and won the Prix des libraires de Nancy.

About The Ghetto Within

(trans. by Frank Wynne, HarperCollins, 2022)

A critical sensation in France, The Ghetto Within is Amigorena’s personal attempt to confront his grandfather’s silence. Passed down, from generation to generation, the silence of Amigorena’s grandfather became his own. A gripping study of inheritance, The Ghetto Within re-imagines the life of this Jewish grandfather, a Polish exile in Argentina, whose guilt provokes an enduring silence to span generations.

1928. Vicente Rosenberg is one of countless European émigrés making a new life for themselves in Argentina. Here, he will create a family and start a profitable business. Still, despite success, he will ache for his mother, Gustawa, who stayed behind in Warsaw with his siblings. For years, she writes him several times a month. But over time, his mother’s letters become increasingly sporadic and Vicente, through delayed missives and late transmissions, begins to construct the reality of a tragedy that has already occurred. And one day, the letters stop altogether. Racked with guilt and anxiety over the fate of his mother and family, he lapses into a deep despair and longstanding silence.

With his new novel, Amigorena employs language to reclaim his “voice” from the oblivion of familial trauma. An effort to understand the ways in which his grandfather’s silence continues to affect the generations that followed, The Ghetto Within is a powerful new addition to Holocaust canon, a stunning introduction of an essential new voice to English readers.

Find more information here.

Schedule

Santiago Amigorena will be on tour in the US in September 2025 (more details to come).

His public schedule will include:

• Wednesday, September 17, 6PM: Event @ Albertine (New York, NY) – event in English. Please register here.
• Sunday, September 21: Event @ Brooklyn Book Festival (NY) – event in English

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

Santiago Amigorena’s US tour is organized in partnership with the Brooklyn Book Festival.