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Andrés N. Ordorica (he/him) is a queer Latinx writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Drawing on his family’s immigrant history and his own third culture upbringing, his writing maps the journey of diaspora and unpacks what it means to be from ni deaquí, ni de allá (neither here, nor there). He is the author of the poetry collection At Least This I Know. His writing has been shortlisted for the Morley Prize for Unpublished Writers of Colour, the Mo Siewcharran Prize and the Saltire Society’s Poetry Book of The Year.

From The Observer: "Andrés N Ordorica’s book How We Named the Stars takes a familiar genre – the campus novel – and joyfully updates it for the 21st century. The hero, Daniel, is a scholarship student at the fictional Cayuga University in upstate New York. The book is largely written in the second person, addressed to his first love – all-American room-mate Sam – who we know from the start has died in tragic circumstances. Ordorica is of Mexican heritage and grew up in the US, before moving to Edinburgh, where he works at the university, designing online courses."

Ordorica, in the interview with The Observer, notes "I was riffing off my own experience of going to university as a first-generation student. Like Daniel, my parents were teenage parents. They didn’t go to university. It felt like a great place to examine some of the difficulties and contradictions that face someone who is coming from a marginalised background. It does feel like there’s a kind of tension in many places, particularly the prestigious universities, between a wish to drive diversity and the need then to take care of their marginalised students."

This reading is made possible by the Theatre Studies Department in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance as well as the English and Writing Departments in the School of Humanities and Sciences.