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A film screening at Szymborska’s Drawer

The National Museum in Krakow and the Wisława Szymborska Foundation would like to invite everyone to a series of screenings of documentary films about Wisława Szymborska. Once a month, meetings with people who knew Wisława Szymborska have also been planned.

In November, a documentary directed by Swedish director Lars Helander will be screened. The film is a part of a series about Nobel Prize winners, prepared by the Swedish television. In Helander’s film, Wisława Szymborska talks about how her life changed after she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, about her war experiences, romantic moments, literary beginnings, her friendships, fascination with jazz, love of old postcards, and other passions, as well as the meaning of Krakow as an artistic centre.

Due to limited space, the film will be screened on three consecutive November Tuesdays: on the 5th, the 12th, and the 19th of November. The screening will take place at the Szołayski House – a Branch of the National Museum in Krakow (pl. Szczepański 9) in the space of “Szymborska’s Drawer” – a unique exhibition dedicated to the Poet.

The first screening will take place on the 5th of November at 4:30 p.m.

Admission to the screening is free. Due to a limited number of places, please pick up the tickets in advance. They are available at the cash desk at the Księgarnia Młoda bookstore in the Szołayski House.
A documentary, 29 min, 1996.

Directed by: Lars Helander

Pic. Jakub Ociepa

Today (the 31st of October) at 5:20 p.m., the Polish Television will broadcast Widok Krakowa (A View of Krakow) directed by Magdalena Piekorz on the air of TVP Kultura! The film features Adam Zagajewski as the host taking the viewers around “his” Krakow. As you may remember, the Krakow Festival Office is the producer of the Polish episode of the City(W)rites series – Magdalena Piekorz’s A View of Krakow – and the shooting was supported by the Krakow Film Commission. We highly recommend it!

Widok Krakowa is a part of the City (W)Wites international literary and film project, , which presents the literary capitals of Europe through meetings with writers connected with these cities. The role of the ambassador of Krakow and Malopolska region is played by Adam Zagajewski, who introduces the audience to his masters, favourite places and his friends among authors. There will also be reminiscences of other outstanding authors connected with the city: Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz. Participants of the 3rd Czesław Milosz Festival were the first to watch this film.

The producer is the Krakow Festival Office, with TVP and the Book Institute as partners. The project is supported by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage with funds from the Promoting Readership program. The funds are managed by the Book Institute.

The film’s media patron is the lubimyczytac.pl portal.

The Polish episode of the City(W)rites is being produced under the Reading Malopolska project. Reading Malopolska is a project envisaged for the years 2007?2013 and supported with the funds of the Malopolska Regional Operational Programme, under which Malopolska and its capital, Krakow, want to communicate their literary heritage and participate in the building of a network of co-operation of creative regions in the field of literature.

The project Literacka Małopolska is co-financed by the European Union as part of the The Malopolska Regional Operational Programme 2007-2013 ERDF.

pic. Michał Sosna

For the entire past week, the city witnessed a real celebration of literature. Krakow received the honourable title of UNESCO City of Literature, the Conrad Festival and the Book Fair traditionally attracted crowds of visitors, and we swapped books in as many as four places. And traditionally, participants of The Second Life of a Book campaign – at Pałac Pod Baranami, our stand at the fair, the Galeria Krakowska shopping centre, and finally during the Najedzeni Fest! culinary festival – did not disappoint.

And soon – more chances to find interesting reads. On the 17th of November at the Arteteka of the Regional Public Library in Krakow (ul. Rajska 12, entrance on ul. Szujskiego), we will swap music CDs and films, computer games, and audiobooks. And a week later (on Sunday, the 24th of November), our traditional book swap at the Wyspiański Pavilion. For more details, please visit: www.drugiezycieksiazki.pl

The Second Life of a Book is a joint campaign of the Krakow Festival Office and Bookeriada.pl. Everyone can take part in the free book swap; just bring at least one book and a maximum of ten books if they are in good condition. Books published till 1995 can be swapped only for those that were also published till that year, whereas newer books (published after 1995) can be swapped for every book available during the given book swap. Find out more about the campaign at: www.drugiezycieksiazki.pl.

Media partners: RMF Classic and Fragile.

Partners: Galeria Krakowska, Strefa Wolnego Czytania, Klubokawiarnia likeKonik

The project was subsided from the resources of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

This weekend, the readingmalopolska.pl portal received the Papierowy Ekran 2013 [Paper Screen] – an award for the best web site on books. We were awarded in the FORMA [Form] category – for the way content is presented, emphasizing navigation, ease of use, interactive features, and original graphic design and functionality. What pleases us most, the verdict was based on joint votes of the competition’s jury, organising body and Internet users. We would like to thank you all for your support!
Papierowy Ekran has been awarded since 2007 for the best Internet portals promoting books and readership: web sites of publishing houses, bookstores, libraries, organisations that promote readership, but also portals on culture, blogs and private web sites. So far, the winners include: BiuroLiterackie.pl (2007), artPAPIER.com (2008), Niedoczytania.pl (2009), Ryms.pl (2010), Wywrota.pl (2011) and Xiegarnia.pl (2012).

This year, the Papierowy Ekran was awarded in two categories. In TREŚĆ [Content] category (addressed to Facebook groups, blogs, fan pages, web sites of publishing houses, profiled bookstores, libraries, cultural portals), the winner is www.popmoderna.pl. An honorary mention was also awarded to www.biblionetka.pl, a website that received the largest number of votes from the Internet users.

The project Literacka Małopolska is co-financed by the European Union as part of the The Malopolska Regional Operational Programme 2007-2013 ERDF.

We have great news for those, who are still thinking of the Conrad Festival, and those, who have not reached the festival events, but dream of getting a festival T-shirt with Joseph Conrad’s portrait. You will be able to buy them starting tomorrow (Tuesday, the 29th of October) at two InfoKraków venues (ul. św. Jana 2 and the Wyspiański Pavilion at pl. Wszystkich Świętych 2). The price is PLN 50. Hurry up – there are only a few left.

Football and sex closed this year’s Conrad Festival. But earlier, Reykjavik moved to Krakow for a few hours.

Despite the actual distance between the two cities, the capital of Iceland and the former capital of Poland have become much closer. All of this thanks to a joint literary project. Now, when Krakow has joined the prestigious group of UNESCO Cities of Literature, which had already included Reykjavik, this cooperation may even intensify. We could see what this may be like in practice yesterday during a series of meetings entitled Popołudnie w Reykjaviku [An Afternoon in Reykjavik].

First, Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, an author of bestseller crime stories, was talking about how to combine a regular job (in her case, being a full-time engineer) with writing. “I have had to limit the time I devote to my normal job recently. It takes about 70 percent of my time now. The rest is devoted to creating books,” the author declared with an engineer’s precision. The most popular of Sigurdardóttir’s characters, Thora, is a lawyer. Yet, before the Icelandic writer created her heroine, she had written children’s books. “Being funny and entertaining all the time appeared to be tiring. I decided to try something new,” said the author of Brakið [The Boat of Death]. If asked about the “carnal life” of her character, Thora, Sigurdardóttir replied that she could not include erotic scenes in her books because… “…Reykjavik is a small town. Everyone here knows everything about one another.”

The second guest from Reykjavik, Hallgrímur Helgason, came to Poland to talk about the novel he has published recently, Konan við 1000° [The Woman At 1000°]. The book was based on the memoirs of the daughter of Iceland’s first president. In his home country, the novel inspired a nationwide discussion. The way Helgason told the story of a woman made it questionable whether everything is allowed in literature. “People excluded from society are an important subject of literature. But for me, it is certainly more interesting than following the story of a happy family which is getting ready for a trip to the Baltic Sea on a sunny day and so on.”

Among the guests of the festival’s final day, the greatest gentleman of Polish crime literature, Marek Krajewski was also present. He gave an open lecture on his own workshop. But the readers took the opportunity to ask him whether… Ebi will be back. We may share a secret here: nothing is decided yet.

The festival was closed with three evening meetings devoted to football and sex. All of that within literary boundaries, of course. Marek Bieńczyk recalled his father in a discussion on football. “He had access to the VIP box. Or, perhaps, he just knew how to get in? I don’t know. But we would go to the stadium very often. He was the one to teach me how to score precise goals,” Bieńczyk said. The writer and essayist mentioned that the story of a boy whose father takes him to a football pitch is a typical for the region of Central and Eastern Europe. Michał Okoński said that this is a most universal activity. “By the way, it is interesting that at this very level, at the stadium, men are capable of touching one another or even hugging. This is a cultural phenomenon that men are unable to be that close,” Okoński pointed out.

Late in the evening, on the last day of the festival, the audiences where incessantly excited. After all, the hero of the night was Katullus, whose poetry collection in Grzegorz Franczak’s new translation has just been released by the Homini publishing house.

Yesterday’s meeting with Kiran Desai ended with a moving history. ‘I was sitting at Heathrow Airport,’ said one of the readers at the beginning of her story during the evening with Kiran Desai. ‘Somewhere near me I saw a decent-looking man. I didn’t want to accost him, but I saw that he had Desai’s book. We struck up a conversation and… we’ve been together since then. It’s been five years since we got married. Thank you,’ said the reader to the writer. This personal story told as an expression of gratitude to the author is one of the most beautiful moments of the 5th Conrad Festival.

This story closed the meeting with the author almost symbolically. Desai, the Indian author writing in English and known to Polish readers thanks to her novel The Inheritance of Loss, answered Grzegorz Jankowicz’s questions about the burden of the tradition and history – the most important one that refers to an individual. However, there were also stories referring to the relationship of literature and life. Desai talked, among others, about the ‘authenticity of Dickens’ characters’. ‘Yes, indeed, it does happen that the literary character is somehow more authentic than the man we know from reality. Literature generally allows something that we don’t expect: a change of experience’, said the Indian writer.

Another writer who talked about the relationship between literature and reality during his evening was Tom McCarthy. His novel Remainders, in which the main protagonist suddenly becomes the owner of 8.5 million pounds after a car accident caused by ‘something falling from the sky’, was published in Poland this year. This sum helps him to reconstruct events from the past by paying people for playing original scenes that resemble what he has already left behind. Answering questions as to what is real and is not, McCarthy referred to Lacan’s psychoanalytic conceptions. He talked about the ‘the trauma of inauthenticity’ of the main character of his book. Compared to Thomas Pynchon, he also talked about the theme of mechanisation, which is important in his novel. And when asked about the essence of telling stories, he said: ‘Literature is an experience.’

On Friday, Radio Kraków presented a radio play Za żelazną kurtyną [Behind the Iron Curtain] for the first time and yesterday the author talked about the contexts of her book in the International Culture Centre. ‘Poles have a tendency to think that what they experienced after World War II was extraordinary in comparison to other countries. But was it really so?’ asked Wacław Radziwinowicz, the host of the meeting. Applebaum answered: ’It’s true that the soldiers of the Home Army in the Lublin region had particularly hard experiences in 1946. The same goes for Christian liberals in Berlin. But apart from that, as far as communist violence was concerned, the situation was similar everywhere in Poland, Germany or Hungary,’ she said. Talking about ‘violence’, Applebaum stressed that she had in mind a specific kind of action addressed to certain social groups rather than masses. ‘Those who became promoted were uneducated, from a low social class or poor,’ said the author, referring to the example of Kiszczak’s career.

Yesterday we also learned about the winner of the award The Goncourt List: the Polish Choice 2013. For the 16th time a jury consisting of students from various Polish universities selected the winner at the French Institute in Krakow. This year’s award went to Frédéric Verger and his novel Arden.

On Saturday the festival audience met also… Tymon Tymański. The pretext for this meeting was the premiere of Tymański’s book ADHD. The two leading topics around which the conversation with the artist was conducted were music and… family.

Earlier, at noon, we were wandering with Maciej Zaremba Bielawski across Europe. Obviously, the leading topic was Sweden. Another event that attracted a large crowd was the meeting of Dariusz Nowacki with Szczepan Twardoch, whose novel Morfina [Morphine] met last year not only with warm reception from critics, but also – which does not always goes hand in hand in it – with a huge interest of readers.

Today at the Festival: at 10 a.m. – Typo-doodling. Typographic workshop for children, at 11 a.m. – in the Literary Lambs for Children series at the Kino Pod Baranami cinema – Plastusiowy pamiętnik (Plastuś’ Diary), and at 12 p.m. – A lesson of impoliteness with Professor Doctor Baldie (a lecture and practical workshop conducted by Marcin Wicha). From 1 p.m. we invite you to An Afternoon in Reykjavik. At first, there will be Poetic appetisers with the participation of Eiríkur Örn Norđdahl, Ţorgerđur Agl Magnúsdóttir, Hallgrímur Helgason and others, at 2 p.m. there will be a meeting with Yrsa Sigurdardóttir – an Icelandic author of crime novels, and at 3 p.m. – an interview of Szymon Kloska with Hallgrímur Helgason, called Charles Bukowski of Icelandic literature. At 4 p.m. – the Poetic Encounters project being an attempt to combine poetry and film, half an hour later (from 4.30 p.m.) – an open lecture of Marek Krajewski on methods and techniques used by the writer, and at 6.30 p.m. – a discussion Football is literature with the participation of Marek Bieńczyk, Wojciech Kuczok and Michał Okoński. The final event will be the meeting entitled Catullus: sex and literature with the participation of Grzegorz Franczak and Aleksandra Klęczar.

“I have stayed in a thousand hotels. Perhaps, even in two thousands,” Cees Nooteboom enumerated. Does this sound surreal? Why not?! After all, surrealism is one themes important to the 5th Conrad Festival.

“Cees Nooteboom is one of the sure future Nobel Prize nominees. His books have been translated into over 40 languages. He has been travelling the world since he was 17 years old. He is immensely popular in Germany and the Netherlands. Perhaps, even more popular than in his home country, the Netherlands,” Alicja Oczko said while introducing Nooteboom’s literary achievements to the festival’s audiences yesterday. Several books from this author have been released in Poland by a Warsaw publishing house, W.A.B. Due to the way he functions, critics call the writer a nomad, but he prefers the word “Nooteboom” because it defines his existence best. “I even wanted to call my book Nooteboom’s Hotel because, after having stayed in several thousand hotels, I know exactly what a perfect Nooteboom place is. Eventually, the publisher insisted on Nomad’s Hotel,” said the Dutch writer.

The host of the meeting, Sławomir Paszkiet, asked the author how much time he has spent at home this year. “Allegedly, you have spent only 18 days in Amsterdam.” Nooteboom not only did not deny, but also talked about his yearly schedule. “I spent many months in Southern American countries. Then, I lived in the house of ten thousand books in Germany for almost three months. There is a swimming pool there and isolation from the world helps to work. I spend summers in Spain. Autumn, in turn, is the time of Festivals. I am here now, but I will be in Munich in a while. And then, I will try to hide again to find some space for writing.

Anne Applebaum was also talking about her search for a working place. The journalist and writer was a guest at Radio Kraków which has executed a radio drama based on her latest book Iron Curtain. “Radio was a very important medium of communist propaganda. The Soviets valued it more than the press,” the author said. While revealing the secrets connected with working on her book, she mentioned her search for source materials in Germany, Hungary and Poland. “My friends helped me a lot. The documents weren‘t hard to access. Perhaps, the situation in Hungary was the worst. The party’s archive belongs to a private collector now. So people who watch over it aren’t particularly friendly.” Applebaum said that we need to talk about history because our neighbours still know very little about us. Poles know hardly anything about the history of Hungarians, while Germans know very little of what was going on here after World War II ended.”

Since the beginning of the 5th Conrad Festival, the halls of Pałac pod Baranami witness strange events. Dressed-up people petting animal casts arouse curiosity. But the surrealist theme also includes Lekcja czytania z… [A Reading Lesson with] Angieszka Taborska and yesterday’s meeting with the Quay brothers. The artists, whose films are presented within the scope of the event, talked yesterday about their fascination with Bruno Schulz’ prose.

As expected, crowds showed up for a meeting with Åsa Larsson yesterday. The author of popular crime stories enjoys a great success in our country. Scandinavian crime fiction is very popular here and Larsson’s books are on bestsellers’ list all the time.

Annual lecture series is a tradition at Conrad Festival. Timothy D. Snyder, an outstanding American historian, told a story with an apocalyptic title Black Earth: Joseph Conrad and the Future of the Planet. At the same time, an American philosopher and art historian, W.J.T. Mitchell, ran a lecture at MOCAK.

Important guests of the second day of the festival also included Huszang Asadi, the author of a book on the hell of Iranian prison and the ambiguous relation that forms between the victim and the torturer, which has recently been released in Poland by the Czarne publishing house. Krzysztof Bartnicki and Jerzy Jarniewicz, in turn, discussed the hardships of a translator’s work with Magda Heydel.

Today at the Festival: at 10.30 a.m., Pinocchio within the Literackie Baranki Dzieciom series; at 12 p.m., the Typogryzmoł typography workshops for children. Also at 12 p.m., a meeting with Maciej Zaremba Bielawski entitled W Szwecji, czyli w Polsce [In Sweden, that is, in Poland]; while at 2 p.m., Morfinista [Morphine Addict] – a meeting with Szczepan Twardoch. The winner of the Goncourt’s List: Polish Choice Prize 2013 will be announced at 4 p.m. and a while later, there will be a meeting with last year’s winner, Joy Sorman. Also at 4 p.m., an outstanding American historian, Marci Shore, while tell what history teaches us. At 5 p.m., a meeting with Tymon Tymański and Rafał Księżyk, the authors of the book ADHD; at 5.30 p.m., a preview of PIOtr Kaliński’s exhibition of graphic designs; at 6 p.m., a meeting with Anne Applebaum at the International Cultural Centre; and at 6.30 p.m. a meeting with Tom McCarth. The second day of the festival will close with a meeting with Kiran Desai (at 8.30 p.m.), Zośka Papużanka and Szczepan Twardoch’s Nocne rozmowy [Night Conversations] at Pracownia Pod Baranami (at 10 p.m.) and the fourth meeting with the Quay brothers’ films at Kino Pod Baranami (at 9.30 p.m.).

The phrase: Krakow Miasto Literatury UNESCO (Krakow, a UNESCO City of Literature), formed from letters over a meter high, was put up in the Market Square yesterday. This way, the inhabitants of the city want to express their happiness with this honourable title Krakow received on Monday. Soon, the Market Square will be decorated with occasional flags, and special ribbons will be hung on the building of the Office of the City (pl. Wszystkich Świętych 3-4) and on the Town Hall tower. Posters with the slogan: I live in Krakow, a UNESCO City of Literature will be hung in the windows of bookshops in the Market Square and in the hall of the Krakow Book Fair.

But there is more. Everyone who visits the Conrad Festival Centre at Pałac Pod Baranami or the Festival stand at the Krakow Book Fair (stand no. A28) by Sunday, will receive free special occasion postcards and badges.  You can already see an almost six-minute-long film created especially on this occasion, in which well-known figures of the literary world answer the question of why Krakow is a city of literature on the websites of the city and the friendly cultural institutions, and soon also on the UNESCO website.

 

 

And finally: everyone who buys a special Festival T-shirt with Joseph Conrad’s portrait at the Festival Centre, will receive a canvas bag – of course with the following inscription: I live in Krakow, a UNESCO City of Literature.

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