Poets & Writers Theater

“Pursue it as if it were possible,” says Álvaro Enrigue about advice for young writers in this 2017 interview filmed at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. “I’m a kid from Colonia Nápoles in Mexico City…there was no way of making an equation that would start with my childhood and finish with me talking to you in Louisiana about my work, in Denmark, as a writer.” Enrigue is the author of several novels, including Sudden Death (Riverhead Books, 2016), his first to be translated into English.

Tsitsiqui Apantzequa Chanaqua, a word in the Purépecha language found in Álvaro Enrigue's new novel, Sudden Death (Riverhead Books, 2016), translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, refers to "a game played with roses as if with balls." Several attempts are made to pronounce the term correctly, before Enrigue himself steps in.