Thu, Jul 31
|Barcelona
Backstory Talks: Carter Sickels
In conversation with Huw Lemmey
Time & Location
Jul 31, 2025, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Barcelona, Carrer de Mallorca, 330, L'Eixample, 08037 Barcelona, Spain
About the event
Join us for an evening with award-winning author Carter Sickels, as he discusses his critically acclaimed novel The Prettiest Star—a haunting, deeply moving story of love, loss, and queer identity in 1980s small-town America.
Set in 1986, The Prettiest Star follows Brian, a young gay man returning home to rural Ohio to spend his final months with his family after years in New York City, where he contracted HIV at the height of the AIDS crisis. Told through multiple voices, the novel explores the reverberations of fear, stigma, and silence—while also holding space for beauty, resilience, and human connection.
Hailed as “a brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel” (Entertainment Weekly) and “a powerful addition to the canon of AIDS literature” (Los Angeles Review of Books), The Prettiest Star won the Southern Book Prize, the Weatherford Award, and the Ohioana Book Award, among others.
About the Speakers
Carter Sickels is the author of The…