The 2013 Typographical Translation Award has been announced and the winner is The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker. That makes two Topol posts in a row here, which by official Literalab rules should disqualify him from being written about for the rest of the year. However, my Best […]
“Under communism the basic building material was greyness. That’s what we all remember. Even those of us who have forgotten everything else. Communism was grey – this truism has poisoned our minds. And so, after our heroic liberation, our first reaction was to rush to a paint shop. And that’s what my country looks like […]
Looking at the list of my top 10 books from 2012, plus an added three from 2011 and two from even earlier, I can’t help noticing that besides the geographical commonality (they’re all by writers from Central and Eastern Europe except the Chilean Carlos Cerda, though even he was writing about being in exile in […]
The Central European Forum takes place in Bratislava from November 15 to 18 and there are a host of writers from the region taking part, including Serbia’s Vladimir Arsenijević, Slovenia’s Drago Jančar (last year’s European Literature Prize winner – more below), Hungary’s György Konrád, Czech Jáchym Topol, Poland’s Andrzej Stasiuk and many more. The conference […]
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 […]
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 […]
My review of Andrzej Stasiuk’s On the Road to Babadag in the summer issue of The Cerise Press. “They lived in the old Jewish quarter, at the edge of a Slovak town, at the foot of a Hungarian castle, so in order to exist and not disappear, they had to create their own rules, their […]
A selection of non-fiction about Central and Eastern Europe noted by critics in the year’s “Best of” lists The best Central and Eastern European non-fiction books of 2011 differ significantly from the fiction in that with only a couple of exceptions they are written about the region in English rather than being from the region […]
The Conrad Festival is underway in Krakow as the Polish city celebrates the literary heritage of the English novelist born as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. Among the Polish and international guests at the festival are Michel Houellebecq*, Andrzej Stasiuk, Roberto Calasso, Alberto Manguel, David Grossman, Eva Hoffman and Jacek Dehnel. The festival was opened by […]
The 14 semi-finalists for the Angelus Central European Literature Award have been announced, including works by writers such as Andrzej Stasiuk, Jenny Erpenbeck and Ismail Kadare. The award is for a Central European novel published in Poland and will be presented to the chosen winner at a mysterious future date in the Polish city of […]
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