Conrad Festival 2012

The fourth annual Conrad Festival begins on October 22 in Kraków, the city the great writer moved to as a child before he hit the seven seas and eventually settled down to become an Englishman. In fact, the festival has nothing to do with Joseph Conrad other than borrowing his lofty patronage to welcome similar literary world travelers and an impressive lineup of Polish writers: with Péter Esterházy, Georgi Gospodinov, Orhan Pamuk, Jaroslav Rudiš, Dubravka Ugrešić and Jeanette Winterson among others from abroad and Marek Bieńczyk, Dorota Masłowska, Zygmunt Miłoszewski and Andrzej Stasiuk among the many Polish writers in attendance.

Besides all the discussion panels and readings the varied program includes exhibitions devoted to W.G. Sebald, with photographs from his books courtesy of the German Literary Archive in Marbach as well as installations created by Polish artist Bogusław Bachorczyk inspired by Sebald’s photos.

There is also an exhibition that was also shown at the Bruno Schulz Festival (which is about Schulz) called “Project Stilettos – Women from Schulz’s Circle,” which is an attempt to discover the stories of Schulz’s female contemporaries. You can see the women’s biographies on the website but they are only available in English through an automatic Google Translate, which is to say, they are not available in English (yet).

You can see the full festival program here.

Photo – a writer who is not attending the festival and whose works won’t be publicly read or discussed there but who nevertheless maintains a certain connection with the festival. First person who guesses the correct name receives a free lifetime subscription to literalab.