Autumn Edition of Visegrad Literary Residency Program in the Villa Decius

is a Czech novelist and short-story writer. Originally worked as a teacher of Czech and Russian languages, however, after professional “burnout”, he moved to the UK and Ireland, where he currently works as a hotel manager. His debut work as a writer is Od sebe/k sobě / Push/Pull (LePress, Praha 2010), a novel about a Czech expat living, working and finding himself in Ireland. His collection of connected short stories Buzíčci / Little Queers (Host, Brno 2013) was very well received by both critics and readers. In this book Folny presents the highs and lows in the lives of Prague homosexuals in unique formal way.rz. In 2018 Folny published Víkend v Londýně / A Weekend in London (Host, Brno 2018), a novel about how there may no longer be time to do everything in life. A story of three Czech friends turning forty and spending a remarkable weekend in the English capitol. His most recent work is a novel Hotel Royal (Euromedia, Praha 2022). In this book Folny invites readers for an exciting and rather disturbing show round of a luxurious hotel in London through interconnected stories of dozens of hotel employees. Folny´s story Invisible Man was translated to Bulgarian and Ukrainian. His novel Weekend in London has been published in Serbia (Vikend u Londonu, Ammonite, Beograd 2020). In September 2022 for his book Hotel Royal Folny received Czech Literary Award of Reflex magazine.

Humanities Ph. D. laureate. She was a lecturer in Institute of Jewish Studies at Jagiellonian University (Krakow), Gender Studies at University of Warsaw, and Polish-Jewish Studies at the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences. She researches the subject of forgotten victims of the Holocaust and queer history of WWII.
Film critic, former member of the selection committee for Krakow Film Festival (2010-2019) and programer of LGBT Film Festival in Warsaw. She worked as a dramaturge for theatrical productions directed by Małgorzata Wdowik, Wojciech Grudziński and Hana Umeda.
An author of:
*Przemilczane. Seksualna praca przymusowa w czasie II wojny światowej (Unmentioned. Sexual Forced Labor during World War II – 2018) [Mauthausen Memorial Research Prize 2020].
*‘Mein Führer!’ The Victims of Forced Sterilization in Lower Silesia, 1934–44 (2019)
*Oni. Homoseskualiści w czasie II wojny światowej (Them. The World War Two History of Non-Heteronormative People – 2021)
and co-editor of:
*Erinnern in Auschwitz: auch an sexuelle Minderheiten (together with Lutz van Dijk and Joanna Talewicz-Kwiatkowska – 2020).
In 2022 her book Oni was nominated to the Nike Literature Award (one of the finalists) and to the Professor Tomasz Strzembosz Award.

studied Film Studies and received his master’s degree in Semiotics and Electronic Culture at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He also graduated from the Institute of Applied Psychoanalysis in Prague, where he completed six years of psychoanalytic training. He is currently a PhD student engaged in research of artificial emotional intelligence. His short stories and poems were published in the Slovak cultural magazine VLNA. Recently, he has been working on his debut novel.

is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies, Research Center for the Humanities, Budapest, Hungary. He is a managing editor of the literary studies review Literatura and author of three books, „A kommunista aszketizmus esztétikája” (Aesthetics of Communist Ascetism, 2011), “Bábelt kövenként” (Babel: Stone by Stone, 2019) and a monography on Miklós Mészöly (2020). His research covers the fields of modern and contemporary Hungarian literature, history of leftist aesthetical thinking. Presently he studies the different fictional representations of Central Europe within the region.