Wade Davis: In Conversation with CBC's Rebecca Zandbergen
November 6, 2020 at 7:00pm
The Words Festival is pleased to welcome author, anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis for a feature presentation of his new book, Magdalena: River of Dreams. Our host for the opening night will be CBC's Rebecca Zandbergen!
Zoom Webinar
6 November 2020, 7pm
Taking up the theme of “Ecologies,” Words 2020 will open the festival with a presentation on the story of the great Rio Magdalena, illuminating Colombia’s complex past, present, and future.
Travelers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. Now in a masterful new book, the bestselling author tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of a land that is home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet. Only in Colombia can a traveler wash ashore in a coastal desert, follow waterways through wetlands as wide as the sky, ascend narrow tracks through dense tropical forests, and reach verdant Andean valleys rising to soaring ice-clad summits. This rugged and impossible geography finds its perfect coefficient in the topography of the Colombian spirit: restive, potent, at times placid and calm, in moments explosive and wild.
Both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry and prayer, the Magdalena has served in dark times as the graveyard of the nation. And yet, always, it returns as a river of life.
Zoom Webinar Registration
