The City and the Writer Symposium Author Posters
In March 2024, NYU Abu Dhabi hosted a symposium that brought together a diverse lineup of award-winning writers from around the globe to celebrate and share their work. This unique event was inspired by the 20th anniversary of the column “The City and the Writer” from Words without Borders magazine, a publication renowned for its exploration of international literature and its impact on urban life, imagination, literature, language, and the nuances of translation.
The convener, Nathalie Handal, invited the NYUAD design team to create a series of limited-edition posters that encapsulated the essence of each writer’s city as described in their featured works. For this project, we chose to utilize the literal words and letters from the writers’ quotes to form visually compelling images that evoke the spirit and atmosphere of the cities they wrote about.
Each poster in the series of 13 is a typographic exploration that transforms text into visual art.
The series was presented to each author at the symposium and now serves as a permanent exhibition in the Arts & Humanities building at NYU Abu Dhabi.
