2015 Nobel Prize for literature winner Svetlana Alexievich gave her speech (available in a translation by Jamey Gambrell) a couple days ago in Stockholm and like her books it was a mix of her present reflections, witness testimonies as well as her diary entries stretching from 1980 to 1997. Her conclusions aren’t very cheerful, but […]
Belarusian writer and investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich has won the Nobel Prize for literature. There is already a lot of commentary, articles and probably interviews. As Philip Gourevitch says in an article in the New Yorker titled “Nonfiction Wins a Nobel”, Alexievich is “the first full-time, lifelong journalist to win the literature prize.” Read from […]
In celebration of the 113th birthday of the Nobel Prize–winning Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert there will be an evening devoted to his work in Malkovich Bar in the poet’s old neighborhood of Žižkov. Great poet, great bar – should be good (though if you don’t understand Czech the bar part will be more important as […]
At Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Work in Progress historian Douglas Smith has a fascinating account of the origin, process and ultimate ambiguities he came up against in writing Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy. Beginning with a Connecticut dinner with a descendant of the Sheremetev family and on through accounts of meetings […]
The Balkanized readership of Ivo Andric For readers of Ivo Andric who are not from the Balkans, the Nobel Prize winning writer seems far from controversial. If anything, the author of The Bridge on the Drina may seem a somewhat old-fashioned novelist, a good and colorful storyteller, ] – hardly someone who deserves an assessment […]
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