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 discussions, exploring the topic of past and present as well as the current crises, will be moderated by Sabir Sultan, the Associate Director of the World Voices Festival and Literary Programs, and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, Chief Program Officer, Literary Programming at PEN America.
Annually, European Literature Night is a brilliant and lively showcase of a diverse and wide range of contemporary writers across many genres, from fiction and poetry, to memoir and histories. The evening will feature multilingual readings, a musical performance, panel discussions and Q&As, as we introduce the audience to the best of contemporary European literature.
Authors, translators, and performers representing 11 E.U. countries will gather in New York City on November 2nd, 2023, at the Ukrainian Institute of America, for an evening of cultural exchanges and conversations exploring the way history has shaped the current crises facing Europe and the power of literature to unearth the truths about how we live and understand the role of writers in times of war and political upheavals.
This year's lineup showcases the multifaceted nature of Europe, featuring participants from Austria, Czechia, Estonia, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain (Basque Country) and Ukraine, and will offer two discussion panels:
1) Contemporary Literature and Global Crises – moderated by Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, Chief Program Officer, Literary Programming at PEN America
In this conversation, writers will discuss how they choose to speak to the current political moment in their work and reflect on how it may have affected their creative processes and approach to their craft. The panel will feature Kätlin Kaldmaa (EE), Anja Kampmann (DE), Andrey Kurkov (UA), Sanaë Lemoine (FR), and Kat Mustatea (RO).
2) The Past is Present – moderated by Sabir Sultan, Associate Director, World Voices Festival and Literary Programs
In this conversation the speakers will reflect on how they sometimes mine the national archives, historical narratives, and collective memory in their practice as writers and storytellers. The panel will feature Anna Frajlich (PL), Lore Segal (AT), Laima Vincė Sruoginis (LT), Kateřina Tučková (CZ), and Kirmen Uribe (ES).
You can register here.
EUROPEAN LITERATURE NIGHT 2023
Where: Wednesday, November 2, 6-10 PM
When: Ukrainian Institute of America
PARTICIPANTS & BOOKS
AUSTRIA | Lore Segal: Ladies’ Lunch
Melville House, 2023
From the master of the short short comes a collection of 16 new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over 40 years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and aging. Can the group organize a visit to one of their number in her new, and detested, assisted living situation? Is this a fabulous party with old friends, or a funeral reception? And does who was sleeping with whom, way back when, still matter? In story after story, Segal's voice is always hilarious and urbane, heartbreaking and profound, keen and utterly unsentimental, as she tackles aging's affronts.
More at https://mhpbooks.com/books/ladies-lunch/
Lore Segal (b. 1928 in Vienna) is an Austrian-American writer. She is a lauded novelist, translator, and writer of children’s books. Her novels include “Other People’s Houses”, serialized in the New Yorker; “Her First American”, which won an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; and “Shakespeare’s Kitchen”, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
CZECH REPUBLIC | Kateřina Tučková: The Last Goddess (Žítkovské bohyně)
Amazon Crossing, 2022
The Zitkova Goddesses (Žítkovské bohyně, Host, 2012) was translated by Andrew Oakland and published by Amazon Crossing in 2022.
Once upon a time, a group of women with extraordinary abilities lived high in the hills of the White Carpathians. They knew how to heal people and help them in misery, they knew how to cope with trouble, and they could see the future. The so-called Žítková goddesses passed down their abilities from generation to generation. Dora Idesová is the last member of their family. She did not learn their art, but studied ethnography and decided to write an extensive scientific study about them. In the late 1990s, she discovered an operative file on the “internal enemy of the state” – her aunt, goddess Surmena. The file was created by the StB (the State Security), and kept in the archives of the Ministry of the Interior. Dora discovers the fate of the women from the village of Žítková and she is surprised to find out that although she did not become a goddess herself, she is an integral part of the secret traditions, too.
More about The Zitkova Goddesses here.
Kateřina Tučková je spisovatelka, dramatička, publicistka, historička umění a kurátorka výstav. Je nositelkou cen Magnesia Litera, Ceny Josefa Škvoreckého a Český bestseller, v roce 2017 jí byla Ústavem pro studium totalitních režimů udělena Cena za svobodu, demokracii a lidská práva, v roce 2022 obdržela Státní cenu za literaturu. V zahraničí byla oceněna literární cenou Premio Libro d’Europa udělovanou festivalem v italském Salernu. Její knihy se překládají do dvaceti dvou jazyků. Její knihy, z nichž nejznámější jsou Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch (2009), Žítkovské bohyně (2012) a loňská Bílá voda (2022) byly přeloženy do dvaceti dvou jazyků.
Photo credit: Lenka Hatašová
ESTONIA | Kätlin Kaldmaa: One is none
Midsummer Nights Press, 2014
Katlin Kaldmaa's One is none, translated into English by Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov, will dazzle readers with its frank, erotic explorations of love and despair. Kaldmaa is a poet of grace and elegance, yet she is also playful and mischievous- whether writing about love or social responsibility. Having herself translated many authors (and from many different languages) into Estonian, it is no surprise that Kaldmaa's poems are global in their scope- nor that she, at the same time, breaks down notions of nationhood, in a series of poems about lovers from different countries. Through humor and love, Kaldmaa explores and illuminates what it means to be human.
More at: https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/97819383
Kätlin Kaldmaa is a prize-winning Estonian poet, writer and translator. She has published five poetry collections and a wide selection of prose books. Her writing has been translated into 33 languages and published wordlwide. She has translated more than 50 works of world’s best literature. Kätlin is Presidenta Emerita of PEN Estonia, and served as International Secretary of PEN International. She is currently working on her sixth collection of poetry and her second novel.
Photo credit: Tomi Kontio
FRANCE | Sanaë Lemoine: The Margot Affair
Penguin Random House, 2021
The secret daughter of a French politician and a famous actress drops the startling revelation that will shatter her family. As Margot is drawn into an adult world she struggles to comprehend, she learns how one impulsive decision can threaten a family’s love with ruin, shattering the lives of those around her in ways she could never have imagined. Exposing the seams between private lives and public faces, The Margot Affair is a novel of deceit, desire, and transgression—and the exhilarating knife-edge upon which the danger of telling the truth outweighs the cost of keeping secrets.
Sanaë Lemoine is a novelist and former cookbook editor. She is the author of The Margot Affair, and the co-author of two cookbooks. Sanaë Lemoine was a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in 2022. Born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, she now lives in Brooklyn.
Photo credit: Gieves Anderson
GERMANY | Anja Kampmann: High as the Waters Rise
Catapult, 2020
One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Mátyás, has gone missing. A search of the rig confirms his fear that Mátyás has fallen into the sea. Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic emotional and physical journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Mátyás’s hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. Waclaw’s encounters bring us closer to his origins while also revealing the problems of a globalized economy dependent on waning natural resources. High as the Waters Rise is a stirring exploration of male intimacy, the nature of memory and grief, and the cost of freedom—the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labor.
More at: https://books.catapult.co/books/high-as-the-waters
German author Anja Kampmann was born in Hamburg and resides in Leipzig. High as the Waters Rise is her first novel, for which she received the Mara Cassens Prize for best German debut novel and the Lessing Promotion Prize. She was also awarded the Bergen-Enkheim Prize and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the German Book Prize.
Photo credit: Juliane Henrich
SPAIN (Basque Country)| Kirmen Uribe: The Past Life of Dolphins
(original in Basque) 2021
According to an old Basque legend, dolphins, in a previous life, were humans. They became dolphins by loving mermaids. By taking that step, their life changed completely. The lives of migrants also change when they start a new life in another country. The Previous Life of Dolphins intertwines three different story lines following a non-conventional narrative form: Kirmen Uribe’s research at the New York Public Library about the life of suffragette Rosika Schwimmer, the life of his own family in New York during 2018 and 2021, and the reminiscences of the past, a past linked to a small coastal town in the Basque Country where the writer grew up with a group of revolutionary women. The Past Life of Dolphins is Kirmen Uribe’s most ambitious novel to date, the most humane, expansive, and luminous, and one that keeps defining the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, and the novel as a form.
The Past Life of Dolphins, his latest novel, is being translated into English by Megan McDowell.
Kirmen Uribe is the author of 4 novels and 2 poetry collections. He won the National Prize for Literature in Spain for his first novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao (Coffee House Press, 2023). In 2017, he was selected for the International Writers Program (IWP) in Iowa, and in 2018, he won the NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship. Written originally in Basque, his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review among others. He lives in New York City, where he teaches at the MFA of Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University (NYU).
LITHUANIA | Laima Vincė Sruoginis: Matilda Olkinaitė. The Unlocked Diary
Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, 2019
What does it mean to open a murdered young poet’s diary 80 years after her death? This book is what would have been Matilda Olkinaitė’s early work, if it hadn’t been for the Holocaust. It collects intimate diary entries – a testament not only of her talent but also of the moral imperative captured in one of her poems: ‘and still I have another wish: to be a human’. Matilda Olkinaitė’s life ended in one of the first unmarked Holocaust pits in the Rokiškis district of Lithuania, in July 1941. Barely 19 at the time, she was a talented poet of great promise. ‘Quietly, without a sound, like fog in the twilight / a beautiful butterfly was extinguished forever…’ – were the words from a poem Olkinaitė wrote in 1937. Growing up in a Jewish pharmacist’s family, she spoke five languages but despite that chose to write only in Lithuanian. Olkinaitė was well known in her district, with her work published in the press on many occasions. “The Unlocked Diary” is the first attempt to bring her work out of oblivion by publishing it all in one volume. The book mainly consists of Olkinaitė’s notebook and a diary written between August 1940 and February 1941. Both the notebook and the diary were hidden away during the war and are the sole records of Matilda’s final years. Her works which were published between 1932 and 1940 are also included here. Irena Veisaitė, the professor who survived the Holocaust and preserved Olkinaitė’s writings, says that ‘the entire Lithuanian tragedy emerges in front of my eyes trough Olkinaitė’s work’.
Dr. Laima Vincė Sruoginis is an author, academic, and life-long member of the North American Lithuanian Diaspora. She has published over twenty books in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom. Among her more recent work is The Unlocked Diary (Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore), which includes her introductory essay and translation from Lithuanian into English of the diary and poems of the Lithuanian poet Matilda Olkinaitė, killed in the Holocaust in Lithuania and her academic monograph, Vanished Lands: Memory and Postmemory in the North American Lithuanian Diaspora, forthcoming with Peter Lang Publishers. She is currently compiling interviews with Ukrainian women who have experienced Russia’s war of terror against Ukraine for her book, Angel of Maidan: Ukrainian Women’s Voices on War.
POLAND | Anna Frajlich: The Ghost of Shakespeare. Collected essays
Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2020
This volume collects the critical prose of award-winning writer Anna Frajlich. The Ghost of Shakespeare takes its name from Frajlich’s essay on Nobel Prize laureate Wisława Szymborska, but informs her approach as a comparativist as she considers the work of major Polish writers of the twentieth century, including Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, and Bruno Schulz. Frajlich’s study of the Roman theme in Russian Symbolism owes its origins to her stay in the Eternal City, the second stop on her exile from Poland in 1969. The book concludes with autobiographical essays that describe her own exile and building her career as a scholar and leading poet.
Anna Frajlich (Senior Lecturer Emerita) taught Polish language and literature at Columbia University for over three decades. She is author of ten books of poetry and five bilingual editions (English, French, Italian, Spanish, Ukrainian). She received The Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit, awarded by the President of Poland. She is also the recipient of literary awards from Kościelski Foundation, Turzański Foundation, the Union of Polish Writers in Exile, and more.
PORTUGAL | A Tribute to the poets Natália Correia, Eugénio de Andrade and Mário Cesariny.
Performed by Pedro Henriques da Silva (PT)
Natália Correia (1923 – 1993) was born in the Azores but moved to Lisbon at the age of 11. She was a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, writer, scriptwriter, translator, and editor, and always a strong advocate of human rights, more specifically of women's rights. Her work spanned various genres of Portuguese media and she collaborated with many Portuguese and international figures. A member of the Portuguese National Assembly (1980–1991), she regularly intervened politically on behalf of the arts and culture, in the defense of human rights and women's rights.
Eugénio de Andrade (1923–2005) Portuguese poet and translator Eugénio de Andrade was born José Fontinhas in Póvoa de Atalaia, Portugal. After his parents separated, the poet moved with his mother to Lisbon and then Coimbra. Influenced by surrealist thought, ancient Greek poetry, and Japanese haiku, Andrade wrote spare, concrete, lyric poems celebrating the body and the natural world with elemental precision.
Mário Cesariny (1923-2006) Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos also known as Mário Cesariny (August 9, 1923, Lisbon, Portugal - November 26, 2006, Lisbon, Portugal) is among the most important Portuguese surrealist poets, having published several major works during a career spanning 50 years. Cesariny was also a painter, but his work became more centered on poetry in the 1950s.
Dr. Pedro Henriques da Silva is a Portuguese composer of concert and film music, a multi-instrumentalist, professor, and lecturer in various fields of music, arts, and sciences. His numerous awards include the 2015, 2016 and 2020 ASCAP Plus Award (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), the 2017 International Portuguese Music Awards (IPMA) for Best Instrumental Performance, the Best Emerging Filmmaker Documentary Award at the American Pavilion at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and the Jury and Audience Awards at the 2021 South By Southwest Film Festival. His film music has been in the official selection of over forty film festivals, including the above and the Venice Biennale and Sundance Film Festival in 2020.
ROMANIA | Kat Mustatea: Voidopolis
Publisher: The MIT Press / Penguin Random House 2023
A first-of-its-kind publication from the The MIT Press Leonardo Series, this hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book made to disappear, retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City. The book’s pages are garbled and can only be deciphered through an AR app published alongside the book—but over a period of a year, its digital components decay the way memory might, leaving behind foggy imagery and half-remembered bits of language.The work's enactment of its own disappearance across all copies of the book worldwide turns the private act of reading into a collective experience of loss. The project won the Arts and Letters ‘Unclassifiable’ Prize for Literature and a literary grant from Cafe Royale Cultural Foundation, and has been exhibited internationally in a variety of digital and physical formats.
More details: https://www.voidopolisbook.com/
Kat Mustatea is a Romanian-American transmedia playwright and artist whose language and performance works enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the computational uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human. Her TED talk, about AI as a form of puppetry, offers a novel take to the meaning of generative art-making. She is a member of ONX Studio (Onassis Foundation) and a fellow at CPH:DOX, and was previously a resident at TED and a member of NEW INC, an art and tech incubator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been presented at Ars Electronica Linz, New Images Festival Paris, Stanley Picker Gallery London, New York Live Arts, and The Cube at Virginia Tech, among others.
UKRAINE | Andrey Kurkov: Grey Bees
Publisher: Grand Iota, 2021
Grey Bees won The National Book Critics Circle Award in 2023. Previous winners of this prize include Toni Morrison, Thomas Flanagan, John Updike, Anne Tyler, Susan Sontag, Jorge Luis Borges, among others. In a ceremony in New York, on May 24, 2023, the American Academy of Arts and Letters elected Andrey Kurkov as Foreign Honorary Member.
Andrey KURKOV (born 1961, Budogoshch, Russia. Lives and works in Kyiv) Ukrainian writer in the Russian language and president of PEN Ukraine, has published more than 25 books. After a period of assisting the KGB as a translator of Japanese, and working as a prison guard in Odesa, where he wrote his first books for children, he is presently one of Ukraine’s leading writers, known for his personal trademark use of gallows humour and an ability to capture the post-Soviet milieu in Ukraine. He began to self-publish his work shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and also took over distribution of the books around the country. In 1994 he published his most widely acclaimed novel Death and the Penguin, became a bestseller and was translated into more than thirty languages. His The Gardener from Ochakov (2010), a dark satire about nostalgia amongst Russians and Ukrainians for the Soviet past. His articles have been published in media outlets including The Guardian. His most recent novel, Grey Bees (2021) tells the story of a beekeeper who lives in the so-called Grey Zone of the country, which is to say the villages and towns of Donbas that have been caught on the battlefront since 2014. His books have been banned in Russia for almost ten years and after the invasion of Ukraine he had to flee from Kyiv.
