Talks in English

January Tuesday 20

Lionel Shriver – Mania

Drinks : 6.30 pm ; 7 – 8.30 pm

Interview conducted by Kasmira Jefford, Editor-in-chief of Geneva Solutions

LIONEL SHRIVER is an award-winning American novelist and journalist whose work has been translated into over twenty-five languages. Best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin (Il faut qu’on parle de Kevin, Belfond, 2006), winner of the 2005 Orange Prize and adapted to cinema in 2011 by Lynne Ramsay, she explores uncomfortable truths with sharp wit and fearless intelligence. Her bestseller The Post-Birthday World (À prendre ou à laisser, Belfond, 2023) examines how a onetime choice can alter an entire life. In her latest novel, Mania (Hystérie collective, Belfond, 2026), she delivers a bleak but funny vision of a society where intellectual merit is heresy. Her fiction remains frighteningly plausible. Her journalism appears in key newspapers including The Guardian and The New York Times. She lives between Lisbon, London and Brooklyn.

February Wednesday 4

Aimen Dean – Nine Lives, my Time as MI6’s Top Spy Inside al-Qaeda

Talk : 6.30 – 7.45 pm ; Buffet : 7.45 pm – 8.30 pm

Interview conducted by Julius Cavendish, partner at Herminius

In partnership with the Diplomatic Club of Geneva

Born in Saudi Arabia, AIMEN DEAN was drawn, as a teenager, into the world of jihad before becoming one of Britain’s most valuable intelligence assets inside al-Qaeda. For eight years he risked his life providing crucial information that helped foil terrorist plots and save countless lives. In Nine Lives (Oneworld, 2018), written with Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister, he recounts his extraordinary journey from radicalization to redemption, offering a rare insider’s view of the global jihadist movement and of the moral complexity of espionage. Both a confession and a thrilling intelligence memoir, his story sheds light on the human cost of extremism and the price of loyalty in a world divided by faith and fear.

April Wednesday 1

Ryan Ruby – Context Collapse

Drinks : 6.30 pm; Talk : 7 – 8.30 pm

Interview conducted by Carolyn Biltoft, Associate Professor of international history at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID)

In collaboration with IHEID

Born in 1983, RYAN RUBY is an American writer, currently based in Berlin. His essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. His debut novel, The Zero and the One (Twelve Books, 2017), is a gothic meditation about the power of somber ideas and seductive yet manipulative friendships. His most recent work, Context Collapse (Seven Stories Press, 2024), is a book-length poem, which offers a sweeping history of poetry from the Bronze Age to Greece and to Renaissance Italy. With a detour to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, the reader is introduced to the creative writing departments of the American Midwest before finally reaching the complexities of Silicon Valley. Ryan Ruby will read selected passages from the poem, followed by a wider conversation about his work and a discussion on what literature and poetry still have to offer today and how they might continue to orient us in the future.

May Wednesday 20

John Boyne – The Elements

Drinks : 6.30 pm; Talk : 7 – 8.30 pm

Interview conducted by Clare O’Dea, journalist and author

Winner of the Prix du roman FNAC 2025 and the Prix Femina étranger 2025, JOHN BOYNE was born in 1971. He is an acclaimed Irish novelist, author of sixteen novels for adults, six novels for younger readers, two novellas, and one collection of short stories. His historical novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Le garçon au pyjama rayé, Gallimard Jeunesse, 2007) received critical acclaim and was adapted into a 2008 drama film of the same name. As of 2022, the book has sold over eleven million copies worldwide and is one of the best-selling books of all time, translated into over 58 languages, and a sequel, All the Broken Places (La vie en fuite, JC Lattès, 2023), was published in 2022. In The Elements (Les éléments, JC Lattès, 2025), he created an epic saga that weaves together four interconnected narratives, each representing a different perspective on the enabler, the accomplice, the perpetrator and the victim. Each is somehow connected to the next, and as the story unfolds, their lives intersect in unimaginable ways. A gripping and profound exploration of guilt, blame, trauma and the human capacity for redemption.

June Thursday 4

Claire Messud – This Strange Eventful History

Drinks : 6.30 pm; Talk : 7 – 8.30 pm

Interview conducted by Kasmira Jefford, Editor-in-chief of Geneva Solutions

CLAIRE MESSUD is an American novelist and professor of creative writing, known for acclaimed works like The Emperor’s Children (Les enfants de l’empereur, Gallimard, 2009) and The Burning Girl (La fille qui brûle, Gallimard, 2018). She spent her childhood in the United States, Australia and Canada, and her international upbringing informs her writing on themes of identity, family and memory. She has received Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships. Since August 2025, she has stopped teaching at Harvard after ten years of ffull-time service. She lives in Cambridge (MA). Her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History (L’étrange tumulte de nos vies, Bourgois, 2024), is based on her own family history. Between 1940 and 2010, the Cassar lived through the events of history, never putting down roots anywhere after leaving Algeria. It is both spacious and distilled, told from five points of view in one family, dazzling us with echoing themes, unraveling secrets and rolling crescendos.

Members 20.- / non members 30.- / students 5.-