The Marino Family International Writers' Academic Workshop

About the Workshop

The 2023 Marino Workshop will feature Yoko Tawada and her book Scattered All Over The Earth

In 1995, Georgetown University conceived the idea of engaging new students in the thoughtful reading of a text by a major international author. During the summer prior to their matriculation into the academic life of Georgetown, the university asks first-year students to read the selected text and complete a reflection assignment. At the beginning of the fall semester, the author of the selected text comes to campus to discuss the novel and the life of writing with all incoming freshmen. Immediately following the author's conversation with the new Hoyas, more than eighty faculty and staff members meet with the students in small discussion groups and together embark on a thematic and stylistic analysis of the novel. These small group seminars encourage students to comment on and debate the author's premises, challenge each others' interpretations, and discuss any questions they have. In addition to their discussion of the literary aspects of the novel, the groups will delve into the philosophical, historical, cultural, religious, and political issues the novel raises.

The Workshop, funded by Frederick Marino (SLL '68) and his family, functions as an introduction to the challenges and rewards of the University's intellectual life of the mind. It affirms Georgetown's commitment to the highest academic standards and adds a significant international cultural dimension to the academic formation of Georgetown students.

From the very start of their lives as Hoyas, students learn to transcend the particularities of their own culture, to develop respect for and understanding of differences of opinion, and to celebrate common human similarities. Georgetown University hopes that this foundation in careful reading, critical thinking, and precise articulation of thought will develop, grow and flourish in the students' undergraduate academic careers.

Previous Marino Workshop Authors

2022 - Juan Gabriel Vasquez, The Sound of Things Falling
2021 - Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
2019 - Esi Edugyan, Washington Black
2018 - Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing
2017 - Lawrence Hill, The Illegal
2016 - Aminatta Forna, The Hired Man
2015 - Romesh Gunesekera, Noontide Toll
2014 - Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names
2013 - Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan
2012 - Tea Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
2011 - Dinaw Mengestu, How to Read the Air
2010 - Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
2009 - Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
2008 - Henning Mankell, Before the Frost
2007 - Nuruddin Farah, Knots
2006 - Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
2005 - Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love
2004 - Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
2003 - Mario Vargas Llosa, Feast of the Goat
2002 - Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
2001 - Ernest Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
2000 - Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
1999 - Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
1998 - Amy Tan, Hundred Secret Senses
1997 - Isabel Allende, Paula
1996 - John McGahern, The Leavetaking
1995 - Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller