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Chair, get it? Thank you to the Ateneo for this honor.

The Department of English, School of Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University invite you to the Fr. Henry Lee Irwin, SJ Memorial Lecture on March 3, 2020, 5-6:30 p.m., at the Escaler Hall.

This year’s lecture is “Manananggal Terrorizes the Ateneo: Fiction vs. the Apocalypse” by author Jessica Zafra.

In the lead-up to her writing workshop at the Ateneo de Manila, Zafra talks about books in an age of mass distraction. She details her writing practice, recounts the true stories behind her fiction, and explains how writing is a survival skill.

Jessica Zafra is a fictionist and TV presenter, ex-columnist and talk radio host. Best known for the bestselling book series Twisted, she was the acerbic voice of a generation that grew up in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Aside from Twisted, her books include Manananggal Terrorizes Manila (1992), The 500 People You Meet in Hell (2006), The Stories So Far (2014), and Twisted Travels: Central Europe (2018). She has won three Palancas for her fiction and a National Book Award for Twisted. She continues to attract a large, somewhat emotional following.

Zafra is this year’s recipient of the Fr. Henry Lee Irwin, SJ Chair in Creative Writing. The chair was instituted by former students of Father Irwin in memory of his work as a professor of English, theater, and rhetoric at the Ateneo de Manila.

Copies of The Collected Stories of Jessica Zafra, published in 2019 by the Ateneo de Manila University Press, will be sold at the venue.

Admission is free. RSVP 8426-6001 (loc. 5310) or lsanchez@ateneo.edu.