Escribir, revivir la historia

Olivier Guez, French writer

Interview: Cristián Warnken

In this interview, Olivier Guez, journalist, researcher and novelist, and Cristián Warnken will talk about their historical research —and that of a sinister Josef Mengele—, as well as their latest novel Mesopotamia (Tusquets, 2025), which rescues the intense life of Gertrude Bell, the “queen of the desert”: adventurer, archaeologist, polyglot and spy who drew borders and marked the destinies of Syria, Palestine, Kurdistan and the future Iraq after the First World War. Characters such as Lawrence of Arabia and a young Winston Churchill also pass through its pages, in a story that crosses love, idealism and bloody colonial interests surrounding oil in that region. There will also be space to talk about admired writers, such as Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Kafka and Joseph Roth.