This year's edition of European Literature Night, hosted by the Ukrainian Institute of America, will present eleven European authors through readings, Q&As and debates. The main panel discussion, exploring the topic of peace and literature, will be moderated by Andrew Singer from Trafika Europe Radio.
A decade-old tradition in many European countries where readings and the exchange of ideas have often happened in communal spaces, such as pubs and coffee shops, ELN brings to New York the spirit of European café culture. Launched in New York in 2017, ELN’s concept is based in the spirit of unity and the belief that literature is a unique and creative medium that can help strengthen the dialogue between individual voices and cultures and break down communication barriers. The 2022 lineup represents a diverse and varied Europe with participants from Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Ukraine.
“Partnering with our New York EUNIC friends and colleagues, we are honored to host European Literature Night 2022, giving a platform to some of today’s best and brightest emerging and established writers. Immersing ourselves in works from other nations expands our world view and allows us to explore the human condition,” said Kathy Nalywajko, President, Ukrainian Institute of America.Participants and Books at the European Literature Night 2022
EUROPEAN LITERATURE NIGHT 2022
Where: Wednesday, November 16, 6-10 PM
When: Ukrainian Institute of America
PARTICIPANTS & BOOKS
AUSTRIA | Raphaela Edelbauer | “The Liquid Land”
Publisher (English translation): Scribe UK, 2019
Beneath the village of Gross-Einland lies a vast cavern that exerts a strange control over the lives of the villagers. There are hidden clues about the hole everywhere, but nobody wants to talk about it — not even when it becomes clear that the stability of the entire town is in jeopardy.
In the literary tradition of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, Raphaela Edelbauer’s tale of trauma and history weaves an opaque dream fabric that is frighteningly true to life, and in the process she turns us towards the abject horror that lies beneath repressed memory.
Raphaela Edelbauer (b. 1990, Vienna) lives and works in Vienna. She writes essays, novels and plays. The Liquid Land was published by Klett-Cotta in 2019. The novel was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and longlisted for the Austrian Book Prize. Winner of the Austrian book prize in 2021 for her second novel DAVE.
CZECH REPUBLIC | Bianca Bellová | “The Lake”
Publisher (English translation): Parthian Books, 2022
A fishing village at the end of the world. A lake that is drying up and, ominously, pushing out its banks. The men have vodka, the women troubles, the children eczema to scratch at. Born into this unforgiving environment, Nami, a young boy, embarks on a journey with nothing but a bundle of nerves, a coat that was once his grandfather’s and the vague idea of searching for his mother, who disappeared from his life at a young age. To uncover the greatest mystery of his life, he must sail across and walk around the lake and finally dive to its bottom. The Lake is a raw account of life in a devastated land and the harsh circumstances under which people fight to survive.
Awarded with the Magnesia Litera Prize as Best Book of 2016. Winner of the 2017 EU Prize for Literature.
Bianca Bellová was born in Prague and grew-up as the communist regime of Czechoslovakia began to fracture. This background provided the material for her first book, Sentimental Novel. She has since written four further novels and worked as both a translator and interpreter. The Lake won the Czech national Magnesia Litera Book of the Year Award and the European Prize for Literature. It has been translated into over twenty languages and is published by Parthian this month. Here, Glen James Brown interviews Bianca Bellová, prior to the UK launch at the Czech Embassy in London.
ESTONIA | Ilmar Taska | “A Car Called Victory / Pobeda 1946“
Publisher (English translation): Norvik Press UK, 2018
In Tallinn in 1946, a young boy is transfixed by the beauty of a luxurious cream-coloured car gliding down the street. It is a Russian Pobeda, a car called Victory. The sympathetic driver invites the boy for a ride and enquires about his family. Soon the boy’s father disappears. Ilmar Taska’s novel captures the distrust and fear among Estonians living under Soviet occupation after World War II. The reader is transported to a world seen through the eyes of a young boy, where it is difficult to know who is right and who is wrong, be they occupiers or occupied. Resistance fighters, exiles, informants and torturers all find themselves living in Stalin’s long shadow.
Ilmar Taska was born in Siberia, where his family was deported and grew up in Estonia. In 2011 he made his debut into the literary world with an autobiographical novella called Better Than Life. In 2014 he won the annual literature prize in Estonia for his short story Pobeda, which formed the basis for his novel Pobeda 1946: A Car Called Victory. His novel Pobeda 1946 (2017) has been translated into fourteen languages and nominated for several international awards. Two short films have been based on it already and The Times Literary Supplement chose it as one of the Books of the Year 2018. Ilmar Taska also works as a screenwriter and one of the scripts he co-wrote and produced has been released by 20th Century Fox. He has directed several films and theatre productions and founded a television channel Kanal 2 in Estonia.
FRANCE | Olivier Guez | “The Disappearance of Joseph Mengele”
Publisher (English translation): Verso Books, 2022
For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through South America in linen suits, keeping two steps ahead of Mossad agents, international police and the world’s journalists. In this rigorously researched factual novel—drawn almost entirely from historical documents—Olivier Guez traces Mengele’s footsteps through these years of flight. This chilling novel situates the reader in a literary manhunt on the trail of one of the most elusive and evil figures of the twentieth century.
Olivier Guez is the author of novels and essays translated into more than thirty languages including American spleen, L’Impossible retour (A History of Jews in Germany since 1945), Praise of Dodging and The Revolutions of Jacques Koskas. His The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, released this year by Verso, was the recipient of the 2017 prix Renaudot. It has been translated worldwide and is currently being adapted for the screen. Guez is also the co-author of the screenplay der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (Fritz Bauer, a German Hero), for which he won the 2016 German Oscar for best script. As a journalist, he has contributed to Le Monde, Point, the New York Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Corriere della Sera. Guez has lived in England, Nicaragua, Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, and currently lives in Rome.
GERMANY | Nora Krug | “Belonging”
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2018
Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement.
After living abroad, Krug returns to Germany, where she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe).
Nora Krug is the author of the graphic memoir Belonging and illustrated an edition of On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. She is an associate professor at Parsons School of Design. Her drawings and visual narratives have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian.
HUNGARY | Sándor Jászberényi | “The Devil is a Black Dog: stories from the Middle East and Beyond”
Publisher (English translation): New Europe Books, 2014
War-torn Africa, a Middle East in crisis and post-Soviet Eastern Europe form the backdrop to the stories told in The Devil Is a Black Dog—stories based on the extraordinary experiences of acclaimed photojournalist Sándor Jászberényi. From Cairo to the Gaza Strip, from Benghazi to Budapest, his characters contemplate the meaning of home, love, family and friendship in the face of brutality. Immersed in the societies he reports on and heedless in the face of war and revolution, Jászberényi observes mothers, martyrs, soldiers, and lovers who must confront the extremes of contemporary experience. In spare, evocative prose, he combines fact and fiction to create a profoundly true portrait of the humanity behind the headlines.
Sándor Jászberényi is a writer and has worked as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and Africa for leading Hungarian newspapers. He has contributed reporting to The New York Times and the Egypt Independent. He has covered the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, the Gaza War, the Darfur crisis, and the conflict with Islamic State—interviewing armed Islamic groups in the process—and has also reporting on the war in Ukraine.
LITHUANIA | Birutė Vaičjurgis Šležas (translator) | Marius Katiliškis “Fall Comes from the Forest”
Publisher (English translation): Pica Pica Press, 2022
Set in the deep woods and bogs of northern Lithuania in the period between the two World Wars, this is the story of a young man struggling to find his place in the world. In the winter, Tilius and his friend Petras work as lumberjacks, but as the spring thaws arrive, Tilius loses his chance at a coveted post as a border guard when he brawls with the lumber company agent and spends two weeks in jail. He accepts a job as a hired hand at a nearby prosperous farm. Caught between his love for the innocent seventeen-year-old Agnė and the seductions of the farm owner’s young wife Monika, Tilius is buffeted by circumstances and his confusing and sometimes uncontrollable emotions. With lame herdsman Laurynas looking on, the story flows through the seasons to its inevitable suspenseful conclusion. Written in exile in the United States ten years after the author fled war in his native land and first published in 1957, this book in many ways is a love letter to a country and a life left behind.
Birutė Vaičjurgis Šležas has been translating Lithuanian literature and nonfiction into English for a number of years. Her first translations, of short stories and folklore were for the weekly Garso Bangos radio program heard in English on Boston University‘s WBUR in the 1970s. She was associate editor and translator of Čiurlionis: Painter and Composer (1994), collected essays on the Lithuanian creative genius. She edited oral histories of WWII refugees in DP camps for We Thought We’d Be Back Soon (2017). Ms. Šležas‘ translation of Marius Katiliškis’ 1957 literary tour de force, “Miškais ateina ruduo” (Fall Comes from the Forest), makes the novel available to the English reader for the first time.
POLAND | Krystyna Dąbrowska | “Tideline”
Publisher (English translation): Zephyr Press, 2022
Krystyna Dąbrowska is an award-winning younger Polish poet whose poems convey a profound curiosity about the world, not only expressed by the lyric speaker but by those inside the poems — two owls guarding their nest, or a dog at the beach, or blind visitors in a museum. Her work and use of language so captivated the three translators that they decided to collaborate on this collection together. Many poems address daily life; others delve into the Holocaust, family relationships, and travels — to Cairo, Georgia, Jerusalem. Tideline is her first book in English, presented bilingually with the original Polish. These are exquisitely-crafted poems that explore how stories, and history, lie beneath the surface: of a neighbor’s face, city streets, ancient ruins, even language.
Krystyna Dąbrowska is the author of four books of poetry, as well as essays and translations, and the winner of two of Poland’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Wisława Szymborska Award and the Kościelski Award. English translations of her work have been published in numerous U.S. literary journals, including Harper’s, The Harvard Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere, and she has been translated into sixteen other languages. She lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.
PORTUGAL | A tribute to José Saramago – 100 years: readings of the Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate’s works
November 16 marks the centenary of the birth of José Saramago, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1998). Amongst his works are O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (1991; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ); A jangada de pedra (1986; The Stone Raft; film 2002); Todos os nomes (1997; All the Names); Memorial do convento (1982; “Memoirs of the Convent”; Eng. trans. Baltasar and Blimunda); O homem duplicado (2002; The Double), As intermitências da morte (2005; Death with Interruptions), A viagem do elefante (2008; The Elephant’s Journey), Ensaio sobre a cequeira (1995; Essay on Blindness, Eng. trans: Blindness, film 2008), Ensaio sobre a lucidez (2004; Essay on Seeing, Eng. trans: Seeing), as well as poetry and drama. The reading will focus on Saramago’s play A Noite after a short introduction about his works and legacy.
The readings will be performed by the members of NYC-based Saudade Theatre, the first and only theatre company in the United States dedicated to producing original and thought-provoking work grounded in the Portuguese-American consciousness.
ROMANIA | Claudia Serea | “Writing on the Walls at Night”
Publisher (English translation): Unsolicited Press, 2022
In this new collection of prose poems, Claudia Serea uses surrealism, irony, and black humor to express her experiences from growing up behind the Iron Curtain to emigrating to New York City. She conjures history through nightmares, folk tales, and dreams, remembers war and oppression in Romania through the eyes of a child, and escapes to a metropolis as strange as the past she carries with her. These poems are the magical beans the reader will use to escape again and again, discovering hidden meanings with each new reading.
Claudia Serea is the author of six poetry collections and four chapbooks, most recently Writing on the Walls at Night. Her poems have been translated and have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac. Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month, and is one of the curators of the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Readings.
UKRAINE | Askold Melnyczuk | “The Man Who Would Not Bow”
Publisher: Grand Iota, 2021
Eight stories subtly linked by their cast of characters including a journalist in a Middle Eastern war zone, an unemployed actor struggling with elder care, members of a commune planning to kidnap a priest, a torturer’s mother and, finally, Nikolai Gogol wrestling with his angels and demons.
Askold Melnyczuk’s stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, appeared in 2021. His four novels include a New York Times Notable, an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. He’s co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers.
