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The Villa Decius Association would like to invite everyone to this year’s last SAGA Literary Salon, the guest of which will be Mikołaj Łoziński, winner of the 2011 Polityka’s Passport for Książka. The event will take place on the 25th of November (Monday) at 11 a.m. During the meeting, he will talk about whether autobiographies help or disturb literature, among others. Join us! Admission is free.
Mikołaj Łoziński (1980) – writer and photographer. He studied sociology in Paris. He worked as a press photographer for Przekrój and Rzeczpospolita. His debut novel Reisefieber (2006) was translated into numerous languages, received the Kościelski Award, the Peacock Feather Award, and the Culture Foundation Award; it was also nominated for the NIKE Award. His collection of short stories for children, Bajki dla Idy, received distinctions in the 2008 Book of the Year and the 2008 Dong competitions. Winner of the 2011 Polityka’s Passport for Książka. In 2011, he published Restauracja, together with photographer Julia Staniszewska. This year’s Prawdziwa bajka was created in cooperation with illustrator Marta Ignerska.
The Literary Salons at Villa Decius are a part of the SAGA creativity workshops project for seniors. The creative writing course is supplemented by meetings, lectures on the theory of literature and contemporary trends, discussions about contemporary and old Polish literature and meetings with authors open to everyone. Previous guests of the SAGA Literary Salons included: Andrzej Franaszek, Magdalena Dygat, Michał Olszewski, Wojciech Nowicki, Magdalena Tulli, Sofija Andruchowycz, Bohdana Matijasz, Michał Rusinek, Agnieszka Kosińska, and Angelika Kuźniak, as well as Krakow’s publishing houses: Karakter, Znak, and Ha!art.
As part of the events accompanying the “Szymborska’s Drawer” exhibition, a meeting with Professor Teresa Walas will take place on the 26th of November at the Szołayski House. Teresa Walas will talk about her long-standing friendship with Wisława Szymborska and tell the inside story of the journey to Stockholm to the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. The meeting will take place at the Szołayski House (Plac Szczepański 9) at 6 p.m. in the multimedia room. It will be hosted by Agnieszka Dauksza. Those who do not make it to the meeting, will be able to watch coverage of the event on the Museum Foundation’s website.
Teresa Walas – Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of Jagiellonian University, literary scholar, literary critic. Wisława Szymborska’s close friend. Member of the Board of the Wisława Szymborska Foundation.
Photo by Jakub Ociepa
Sławomir Zubrzycki’s concert inaugurated this year’s edition of the Conrad Festival. It was the second public presentation of the extraordinary instrument called the viola organista – reconstructed by Zubrzycki, and invented by Leonardo da Vinci – the first bowed string instrument whose description survived until this day. Today, media across the world write about the creator from Krakow! We are proud to have been able to present this unusual event to the audience.
We encourage you to read the articles:
www.huffingtonpost.com
plus.lefigaro.fr
We recommend the following video to all those who want to recall this remarkable evening:
Tom McCarthy – writer and artist, whose works have been translated into more than twenty languages – visited Krakow during the Conrad Festival. In an interview conducted by Maksymilian Lawera – Jagiellonian University student, and Katarzyna Pawlicka – Jagiellonian University doctoral student, he talked about his novel Remainder, which was published in Poland this year. We encourage you to watch the conversation with the writer.
We would like to remind you that the Writers in Motion Audiovisual Library of Writers is a project carried out by the Krakow Festival Office in cooperation with the Faculty of Polish Studies of Jagiellonian University. During the conversations conducted with authors by Jagiellonian University students and doctoral students, audiovisual profiles of Polish and international writers are created, both by those who live in Krakow and those who visit the city during its numerous literary events.
Photographs see cities in the colours of words – Iosif Brodsky’s Venice 20.11 – 20.12.2013.
Iosif Brodsky’s Watermark contains something that forces its readers to act. To abandon the place they chose for themselves. It pushes them to take a journey – perhaps the longest in their lives. All of this to make them see, to focus their attention on one detail which constantly gets blurred for the sake of things. This fluid dependency enforces change. And in almost all cases, it is a change for the better.
We would like to invite you to visit an exhibition entitled Fotografie widzą miasta w barwach słów – Wenecja Josifa Brodskiego [Photographs see cities in the colours of words – Iosif Brodsky’s Venice]. The photographs by Monika Gromala were taken during her stay in Venice in February 2013. The visitors will have a chance to see unknown corners of Titian and Tintoretto’s city, as well as to confront them with the image presented in the Watermark prose collection. Each photograph was labelled with a proper quotation from the essay.
Entrance is free of charge.
Location: Regional Public Library in Krakow (2nd floor)
Date: the 20th of November – the 20th of December 2013
Another episode of the Writers in Motion Audiovisual Library of Writers belongs to Filip Springer – reporter and photographer, a guest of this year’s edition of the Conrad Festival. The conversation was conducted in Krakow by Maria Kobielska, Jagiellonian University doctoral student. Filip Springer publishes in the national press and writes regularly for the Polityka weekly. He debuted in 2011 with a reportage book entitled Miedzianka. Historia znikania, for which he was nominated for the following prestigious awards: NIKE, the Ryszard Kapuściński Award, and the Gdynia Literary Award. Listen to the interview!
We would like to remind you that the Writers in Motion Audiovisual Library of Writers is a project carried out by the Krakow Festival Office in cooperation with the Faculty of Polish Studies of Jagiellonian University. During the conversations conducted with authors by Jagiellonian University students and doctoral students, audiovisual profiles of Polish and international writers are created, both by those who live in Krakow and those who visit the city during its numerous literary events.
Cees Nooteboom – one of the most outstanding Dutch writers, translator, poet, and traveller, listed among the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature – is the central figure of another episode of the Writers in Motion series. The interview in Krakow, during the 5th edition of the Conrad Festival, was conducted by Aleksandra Wojtaszek – Jagiellonian University student, and Bartłomiej Woźniak – graduate of Jagiellonian University. We highly recommend it and encourage you to watch!
We would like to remind you that the Writers in Motion Audiovisual Library of Writers is a project carried out by the Krakow Festival Office in cooperation with the Faculty of Polish Studies of Jagiellonian University. During the conversations conducted with authors by Jagiellonian University students and doctoral students, audiovisual profiles of Polish and international writers are created, both by those who live in Krakow and those who visit the city during its numerous literary events.
Jakuck. A soirée with Michał Książek.
Thursday, the 21st of November, 6 p.m.
Księgarnia Pod Globusem bookstore, ul. Długa 1 Krakow
The Wydawnictwo Czarne publishing house, New Eastern Europe and the Księgarnia Pod Globusem bookstore would like to invite everyone to a meeting with writer and Siberian guide Michał Książek.
I am convinced that Editor Giedroyc would be happy. Michał Książek carried out the proposal from the last edition of “Notatki Redaktora” (“Editor’s Notes”) by going on a fascinating journey following Sieroszewski’s Siberian stories and discovering this unjustly forgotten author to us. Combining linguistic and ethnographic notes with a reportorial account of his own experiences of life in Yakutsk, Książek continues the excellent tradition of Polish explorations of Siberia in a modern way. I’ll even say that such descriptions of the cold have never before appeared in Polish literature. I am genuinely impressed!
Mariusz Wilk
Edward Piekarski, exiled to Siberia in 1888, wrote a dictionary of the Yakut (Sakha) language. Wacław Sieroszewski landed in Siberia ten years earlier, and the result of his years-long exile is an outstanding ethnographic work, Dwanaście lat w kraju Jakutów [Twelve Years in the Land of the Yakuts]. Michał Książek went to the Yakutia (Sakha) Republic of his own free will. Following the tracks of his great predecessors, he travelled across this vast white land, fascinated with the customs and the language of its inhabitants. Yakutia, a country of an area nine times larger than Poland, is inhabited by just under a million people. Winter lasts for most of the year, so there are innumerable terms for types of snow and frost, and the cold is so severe sometimes that in the Yakut language, the friendly Ded Moroz (Father Frost) was replaced with the Bull of Winter. Declining Yakut words using Polish case forms, Książek writes a kind of peculiar grammar of this distant, yet close, snowy expanse.
Admission is free. Don’t miss it!
W dzieciństwie stawałam w otwartych drzwiach and PRAKTYKI – we have two poems by the winners of this year’s Wisława Szymborska Award for you.
Krystyna Dąbrowska
*** [W dzieciństwie stawałam w otwartych drzwiach]
W dzieciństwie stawałam w otwartych drzwiach, a któreś z rodziców
przykładało linijkę do mojej głowy,
ołówkiem zaznaczało kreskę na framudze.
Później były inne drzwi, w których stawiała mnie ambicja.
Rysując ostrą krechę, sprawdzała ile urosłam.
Teraz ty mnie mierzysz, a ja ciebie.
Dwie poziome drżące kreski –
nasze ciała
wtulają się w siebie, wnikają
i nie ma wyżej, niżej, nie ma miar.
Łukasz Jarosz
PRAKTYKI
Krótka ulica.
Uczniowie Mechanika
z reklamówkami w rękach
wchodzą do tłustych warsztatów.
Płytko oddycha niebo.
Wyprowadziłem się.
Przez cztery dni paliłem rzeczy po sobie.
Zawstydziłem się, bo podpatrzono mnie
w trakcie modlitwy.
Mój głos ciemniał wśród gałęzi.
Teraz ta ulica.
Chłopaki odpalają papierosy,
dzielą się śniadaniem.
Żują w ustach ostry
mądry chleb.
