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 […]
As I made my way through Frankfurt Airport on the way back to Prague from the book fair a strange incident took place, something that reflects a new and interesting trend in writing from Central and Eastern Europe – certainly in terms of the books getting translated into English – but which almost got me […]
Marek Bieńczyk has won Poland’s top literary award for Książka twarzy (A Book of the Face). The Nike Literary Award (Nagroda Literacka NIKE) has been in existence since 1997 and has had Olga Tokarczuk, Wiesław Myśliwski, Jerzy Pilch and Czesław Miłosz among previous winners. Speaking of Miłosz this year’s Audience Award went to Andrzej Franaszek […]
The European Commission has come out with its list of translation grant recipients, otherwise known as “Strand 1.2.2 : Support for Literary Translations: selection results.” You can go to the official website and click on the link to a bunch of PDF charts and graphs that are about as unliterary as you can get, or […]
Unless a writer is translated into one of the big languages – English, French, German, Spanish – then it becomes very hard to get translated into the smaller languages. Three EU Literary Prize winners – the Czech Republic’s Tomáš Zmeškal, Bulgaria’s Kalin Terziiski and Romania’s Răzvan Rădulescu, talk about the challenges facing writers from smaller languages […]
It is a cliché that can be applied to almost anything – “You don’t know what you’re missing.” And in all likelihood you really don’t know. Not anymore though, at least as it relates to Czech books. The linguistic iron curtain is being lifted. The Czech Literature Portal will have regular English-language updates on recently […]
The two stories in BEF 2012 that stood out the most for me were Czech writer Jiří Kratochvil’s “I Loshad’” and “The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus” by Polish writer Janusz Rudnicki. The excellence of these two stories shouldn’t be all that surprising. For while these and other Dalkey anthologies try to give exposure to young […]
Czech author and publisher Martin Vopěnka was a guest at the Prague Writers’ Festival in 2012 and spoke to literalab about his path to becoming a writer, the influence of his studying physics on his most recent novel and his foray into children’s and young adult fiction in The Sleeping City. Read the full article […]
“There is one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious masses. The work of creative writers, written out of the author’s real necessity, and for his own benefit. The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherein laws become significant. * Every page should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, […]
“To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.” – from new translations by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine of Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems to Czechoslovakia.” The latest issue of Poetry magazine features a number of selections of the work of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. I will soon be writing something about Tsvetaeva’s brief but impactful time living […]
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