Meet the Author returns on November 29th, at 6:30 p.m., for a conversation with American writer Samantha Rose Hill, author of Hannah Arendt, A Biography (Relógio D’Água), a biographical portrait of one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century. The session is open to the public, and admission is free.

Born in Germany in 1906, Hannah Arendt fled to Paris in 1933 with her mother and husband after being arrested (and released) by the Gestapo. In 1941, after Paris fell into the hands of the Nazi German regime, she fled to the United States through Lisbon – where she lived between January and May of that year.

It was in the United States that she produced some of the most formidable works of political thought of the 20th century – The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Between the Past and the Future, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Disconcerting thinker, self-styled political scientist, rejected the field of philosophy (which saw her more as a journalist), and focused her work on understanding.

“Ask about the impact of my work on others. If I may speak ironically, this is a male issue. Men always want to be influential. I want to understand,” she said in an interview with German journalist/commentator Günter Gaus in 1964.

In this work, which will be presented at FLAD, the author Samantha Rose Hill interconnects the events of Arendt’s life, commentary on her extensive work and personal correspondence, in an exercise of contextualization and understanding of her main works carried out through the exploring of the experiences that formed her thought, resulting in an essential work to understand the author, that remains as current as in the last century.

Samantha Rose Hill is a researcher and member of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities (where Hannah Arendt’s personal library is deposited) and an associate at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, LitHub, openDemocracy, Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory and Theory and Event. She composes this book using new biographical aspects and archive documents, poems and correspondence, which reveal a disconcerting thinker, with a passion for the life of the spirit stimulated by her love for the world.

Meet the Author is an initiative of FLAD, in partnership with PÚBLICO newspaper. The goal is to provide Portuguese readers with close contact with some of the most respected writers in the USA.

The sessions will take place monthly and will be open to the general public, free of charge. The invited authors are interviewed by journalist Isabel Lucas, also author of Viagem ao Sonho Americano (Companhia das Letras), in which she seeks to understand America through books.

The conversation with Samantha Rose Hill will take place on November 29th, at 6:30 pm, in the FLAD auditorium, at Rua do Sacramento à Lapa, 21 – Lisbon.

The session is open to the public and admission is free. If you would like to watch, please email fladport@flad.pt.