Mexican Writer Guadalupe Nettel to Headline Puterbaugh Festival at OU

The 2025 Puterbaugh Lit Fest will return to the University of Oklahoma March 3–4 when Mexican novelist, short-story writer, and essayist Guadalupe Nettel visits the Norman campus.

Called “one of the most original voices in Latin American literature,” Dr. Nettel (b. 1973) is the author of award-winning novels and collections of short stories translated into more than twenty languages; many of her works have been adapted for theater and film. She’s served as the editor of cultural and literary magazines such as Número Cero and Revista de la Universidad de México. Still Born, her most recent novel, was a finalist for the International Booker Prize. In April 2025 Bloomsbury will publish The Accidentals, a new collection of her short stories translated by Rosalind Harvey. Nettel lives in Paris as a writer in residence at Columbia University’s Center for Ideas and Imagination.

Nettel will deliver “Writing with Light,” the 2025 Puterbaugh lecture, at 10:30 a.m. on March 4 at the Oklahoma Memorial Union. Other highlights of the festival include a talk by Harvey, Nettel’s principal English-language translator; a roundtable discussion of contemporary Mexican literature; and a reception featuring comments by Edurne Pineda, Honorary Consul of Mexico in Oklahoma City. The detailed schedule is forthcoming.

Since 1968, the Puterbaugh Festivals have furthered the educations of thousands of OU students. Sponsored by World Literature Today, OU’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, the festivals are a living tribute to J. G. Puterbaugh (1876–1965), an Oklahoma philanthropist, entrepreneur, and civic leader who loved poetry and believed it to be a source of cultural enlightenment and a means for understanding other cultures from around the world. He also believed in learning foreign languages as a primary channel of gaining insight into other cultures. Alene Puterbaugh, on behalf of the Puterbaugh Foundation and in memory of her late husband, endowed the festivals in perpetuity with a donation of $150,000 in 1978.

Co-sponsored by OU’s Department of Modern Languages, Literatures & Linguistics and the Center for the Americas, all festival events are free and open to the public. For additional information or accommodations, call the World Literature Today offices at 405-325-4531.