Balla (Vladimír Balla) has won Slovakia’s biggest literary prize for his novella In the Name of the Father. In its seventh year the Anasoft litera comes with an award of €10,000. Previous winners include Pavel Vilikovský, Marek Vadas, Milan Zelinka, Alta Vášová, Stanislav Rakús and Monika Kompaníková. Hopefully, the award will give Balla a promotional […]
In conjunction with the publication of Nine Rabbits by Bulgarian writer Virginia Zaharieva, Istros Books is holding a couple of events in London. On September 20 you can listen to the author in conversation with her translator Angela Rodel while the next evening the pair will be joined by Istros publisher Susan Curtis-Kojakovic and Milena […]
At Tablet there is an essay on Yiddish poet Simkha-Bunim Shayevitch, (also written as Simcha Bunem Shayevich) whose two poems were found “after the war among the heaps of rubble left in the empty ghetto of Lodz.” The essay was written by Yiddish author Chava Rosenfarb, who died last year, and makes the tragic story […]
In this day and age when everyone wants to write a novel before they’ve read their fourth whole book it’s good to have the reminder that you need to literary crawl before you literary walk. Okay, so lit crawls have nothing to do with that idea – no matter, because this Saturday, September 15 for […]
From Absinthe: “Absinthe 18 is coming soon and it’s full of exceptional art & writing from Europe, including a short play by Vlad Zografi, and poetry & prose by Marie-Claire Bancquart, Nichita Stanescu, Pia Tafdrup, Sladjan Lipovec, Marco Candida, Kristina Lugn, Hernan Migoya, Marko Pogacar, Iulian Ciocan, Jose Corredor-Matheos, Kamil Bouska, Jiri Brynda, and a […]
Joanna Trzeciak has won this year’s Found in Translation award for her rendition of Sobbing Superpower by Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz. The annual award is presented by The Polish Book Institute in Krakow, W.A.B. Publishers, the Polish Cultural Institute in London and the Polish Cultural Institute New York for the best English translation of a […]
The 25th Moscow International Book Fair wrapped up today and if the scant English-language news coverage is any indication, either this particular event is somewhat backward looking or else the Iron Curtain has redescended across the Continent recently without my noticing. Here are some of the headlines relating to the fair: “Books by Fidel Castro […]
Apparently it isn’t only filmmakers who misunderstand Kafka. In the Times Literary Supplement Gabriel Josipovici writes an article covering a number of quite varied books about or related to Kafka titled “Why we don’t understand Kafka” that brings a demanding yet even-handed take on the ultimate resistance to interpretation that Kafka’s writing contains. In a […]
It’s positively raining literary festivals in this part of the world. Bruno Schulz, Slovenia and now Berlin. It would be a miracle if there’s any actual writing getting done. The International Literature Festival Berlin is underway and among the Central and Eastern European writers taking part are Nobel prize winner Herta Müller, Péter Nádas (who, […]
The latest edition of Bookslut has Jessa Crispin’s interview with Claudio Magris, conducted in Trieste. He talks about Trieste itself, its literary culture and his relation to it. He also discusses his novel Blindly and, of course, Danube. Always fascinating. Bookslut also has an excellent review of Gombrowicz’s Diary by Daniel Shvartsman though he mistakenly […]
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