VIENNA HUMANITIES FESTIVAL
PROGRAMM
THEY THINK IT’S ALL OVER
FINTAN O'TOOLE IN CONVERSATION WITH MISHA GLENNY
SONNTAG, 01.10. 2023 / 17h00,
AKADEMIE DER BILDENDEN KÜNSTE WIEN, AULA
Brexit and Trump’s victory in 2016, announcing the rise of populism in Western democracies, sometimes appeared like a circus performance alternating between belly laughs and a sinister threat. Behind the comic theatricality lay the all-too-real possibility of the establishment of an electoral autocracy for which Hungary’s President, Viktor Orban, had provided the model. FINTAN O'TOOLE, Ireland’s greatest living non-fiction writer and winner of numerous prizes, has chronicled the rise of the new Anglo-American populists in his columns for The New York Review of Books, The Irish Times and The Guardian with unparalleled wit and acuity. In conversation with IWM Rector MISHA GLENNY, he will consider whether our democracies are strong enough to weather the populist storm.
© BENSON RUSSELL
Fintan O’Toole is the leading cultural and political critic of his generation. A columnist for The Irish Times and Advisory Editor of The New Yorker Review of Books, his most recent book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland was selected as one of the New York Times’s top 10 books of 2020. An elegant and forensic critic of the populist politicians like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, he also contributes to The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. Fintan is currently writing the authorised biography of the late Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney. His witty and insightful style of writing has won him many prizes in Britain, Ireland and the United States. His books on politics include the bestsellers We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland; Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain; Ship of Fools; and Enough is Enough.