On 6 June (Thursday) at 5 p.m., we invite you to Massolit Books for a meeting with this year’s Visegrad Literary Residency scholarship holders.
On 6 June (Thursday) at 5 p.m., we invite you to Massolit Books for a meeting with this year’s Visegrad Literary Residency scholarship holders.
Until recently, Central Europe was mainly associated with provinciality and conservatism. However, the work of writers of the younger generation originating from this part of Europe is permanently changing this image. The motif of In Betweenness//’ being between’ is a common theme for Michaela Kučová (Slovakia), Timei Sipos (Hungary) and Tomasz Jędrowski (Poland), whose work draws on the heterogeneous and the non-obvious. For them, Central Europe is a starting point, not an final goal.
What does it entail to function at the crossroads of cultures and languages? How does the experience of being in-between affect identity? How does it deform in literature? What place does the process of translation from one language to another have in this perspective? To what extent does bilingualism make it possible to be in the world?
These are the questions that will be the focus of the conversation with the scholarship holders of the Visegrad Literary Residency currently residing at Villa Decius.
The meeting will be moderated by Dr Zofia Ziemann, translator and translation scholar from the Department of International Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Meeting will be held in English.
Timea Sipos is a Hungarian author and translator with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A former Steinbeck Fellow and winner of the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, her work has received support from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, PEN America, and more. Her writing and translations have appeared in ‘Prairie Schooner’, ‘Denver Quarterly’, ‘The Florida Review’ and other magazines.
Tomasz Jędrowski studied law at Cambridge and the Université de Paris. He speaks five languages and currently lives in France. His debut novel, ‘Swimming in the Dark’, is a queer love story set in 1980s Poland. It has so far been translated into 19 languages. It was voted Book of the Year by the Guardian.
Michaela Kučová, a Slovak writer and cultural manager. Her work on music and visual arts has been published in most of the mainstream and specialised media in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In 2016, she co-founded the feminist newsletter ‘Kurník’. Michaela is also one of the creators of Secondary Archive, a digital archive of women artists from Central and Eastern Europe.
The Visegrad Literary Residency Programme is financed by the International Visegrad Fund.
