Join us for a Special author series event hosted by the Harvard Club of Boston in Partnership with The Harvard COOP
Register for an in-person event with Professor Amartya Sen
In Conversation with Rishi Reddi
Monday, December 6, 2021
6:30 pm ET Reception and Mingling
7:00 pm ET Discussion Begins
Back Bay Clubhouse
Home in the World
We are delighted to partner with the Harvard COOP and Harvard Magazine to present this extraordinary Author Series event at the Back Bay Clubhouse.
A celebration in anticipation of Professor Amartya Sen's long-awaited memoir about home, belonging, inequality, and identity, recounting a singular life devoted to the betterment of humanity. Professor Sen will be joined in conversation with local author and award-winning novelist, Rishi Reddi.
Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University. The author's profile is enormous, ranging across continents and disciplines. As Nadine Gordimer wrote, "Sen is one of the great minds of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries." A truly "global intellectual" (Sunil Khilnani, Financial Times), Sen is also one of our greatest stylists, pleasurably mixing "moments of profundity with flashes of mischievous provocation" (William Dalrymple, NYRB). He has won many notable prizes, including the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India, in 1999; a National Humanities Medal in 2011; and, of course, the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In his memoir, Home in the World, these “homes” collectively form an unparalleled and profoundly truthful vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. With characteristic moral clarity and compassion, Sen reflects on the cataclysmic events that soon tore his world asunder, from the Bengal famine of 1943 to the struggle for Indian independence against colonial tyranny—and the outbreak of political violence that accompanied the end of British rule. Witnessing these lacerating tragedies only amplified Sen’s sense of social purpose. He went on to study famine and inequality, wholly reconstructing theories of social choice and development. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions to welfare economics, which included a fuller understanding of poverty as the deprivation of human capability. Still Sen, a tireless champion of the dispossessed, remains an activist, working now as ever to empower vulnerable minorities and break down walls among warring ethnic groups.
"Sen is so engaging, so full of charm and has such a clear gift for the graceful sentence. It’s a wonderful book, the portrait of a citizen of the world." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator [UK]
"[A] quietly captivating memoir . . . [A] contemplative travelogue and a fascinating look into the singular consciousness of one of the world’s foremost thinkers . . . [A] galvanizing reflection on a roaming life." - Publishers Weekly
Rishi Reddi is the author of the novel Passage West, a finalist for the New England Book Award. Set in California’s Imperial Valley at the onset of WWI, it tells the tale of rival Punjabi sharecroppers Ram and Karak, their Mexican sweethearts, Japanese neighbors, and Anglo friends at a time of rising xenophobia. Rishi’s previous work of fiction, Karma and Other Stories, received the 2008 L.L. Winship /PEN New England Award for Fiction. Stories from that collection were selected for Best American Short Stories, aired on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space in NYC, received honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize, and chosen for Boston's "One City One Story" all-community read. Rishi is a recipient of fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the U.S. Department of State and is a National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow for 2021-2022. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Northeastern University School of Law, she was born in Hyderabad, India, and grew up in Great Britain and the United States. She lives in Cambridge, MA
Any questions, please contact Kristy Burns (kburns@harvardclub.com).
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