The 27th Vilenica International Literary Festival runs from September 5 to 9 throughout Slovenia, primarily in the region bordering Italy. “Nomadic writers” is a thematic focus at this year’s festival, with a selection of guests who amply illustrate this tendency. Bekim Sejranović is a writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina who lives in Oslo, Dimitré Dinev […]
The 5th International Bruno Schulz Festival kicks off this week in his hometown of Drohobych, Ukraine (formerly Drohobycz, Poland). Called “The Ark of Bruno Schulz’s Imagination” the festival also has some sideline events in the regional capital of Lviv, including an exhibition of his paintings and graphic works opening September 4. Schulz first exhibited in […]
The latest Words Without Borders is out: Writing from the Silk Road, featuring fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, China. Half of the work was actually written in Russian while the other three pieces were translated from Uzbek, Georgian and Uyghur. Exiled Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, who has a poem […]
The BBC and Lonely Planet have posted a “Mini guide to Kafka’s Prague,” which begins with the claim that though Kafka never mentions Prague in his fiction “his tales of totalitarian bureaucracy were greatly influenced by the city.” They then proceed to demonstrate this influence by listing some hotels and telling you about the Kafka […]
At Russia Beyond the Headlines there is an interview with Boris Pasternak’s nephew Nicolas Pasternak Slater talking about his translation of the correspondence between his family and his famous uncle as well as his current project of preparing a trilingual edition of his mother Lydia Pasternak’s poetry for publication (she wrote poetry in Russian, German […]
Hungarian Literature Online has published the introduction to Miklós Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova, which is being published in an English translation by Tim Wilkinson by the Contra Mundum Press in September. Szentkuthy’s obscurity in the English-speaking and reading world makes even some of Central Europe’s most obscure writers seems like the stars of their own […]
There are some new magazines out with Central European content. Two Lines: Passageways has Julia Sherwood’s translation of an extract from Slovak writer Ján Rozner’s Seven Days to the Funeral as well as a fantastic selection of Russian poets such as Arseny Tarkovsky (the filmmaker’s father), Velmir Khlebnikov and contemporary Shamshad Abdullaev. To read a […]
It begins in Berlin in November 1943 as British bombs gradually do their part in shattering both the illusion and reality of the Thousand-Year Reich. Sergey Nabokov, the gay brother of then still largely unknown Vladimir, blurts out a pro-English statement at the ministry where he works as a translator that he knows full well […]
Poet and translator from the Hungarian George Szirtes has a wonderful corrective about what he refers to as the “constant and loud debate” regarding the death of the novel. Starting off from the remarks at the Edinburgh Book Festival of poet Jackie Kay that it’s odd that novelists are constantly predicting the end of the […]
A list of 14 writers from Central Europe makes up the semi-finalists of Poland’s Angelus Central European Literature Award. The prize selects books from the region that have been published in Polish the preceding year and has had its share of big name as well as fairly obscure winners over its six-year history including Petér […]
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