“In terms of staging, opera has been clearly heading in the direction of extensive theatrical productions in recent years; hence the idea to invite directors who are proficient in both theatre and opera to the Opera Rara Festival projects. As a critic dealing mainly with theatre, I intend to look at opera with my guests as an important voice in public discourse – an art that consciously operates with a theatrical and musical sign, the aim of which is not only to give aesthetic pleasures but also to express through emotion what cannot be said directly”, promises Tomasz Domagała, who will conduct meetings with the directors invited to the festival
31 January 2020, 9:00 p.m.
Fresh Café, Nadwiślańska 2-4
Meeting with Krystian Lada
Krystian Lada is currently the hottest name in Polish opera. When the programme of the Opera Rara Festival was announced, the name of this director was known only in the theatre and opera circles, but after his romance with Polityka’s Passport, it also became famous among wider audiences. It is no wonder then that the meeting with him is an important event of the festival, especially since the program includes two of his productions: the classic Sigismondo by Gioacchino Rossini and the contemporary Unknown, I Live With You by Katarzyna Głowicka.
The meeting will be hosted by theatre critic Tomasz Domagała, author of the domagalasiekultury.pl blog.
7 February 2020, 9:00 p.m.
BAL, Ślusarska 9
Meeting with Magda Szpecht
Magda Szpecht is one of the most talented young directors in Polish theatre. She is known to audiences for her extremely creative explorations and personal, unobvious theatrical language. Her efforts in dealing with the difficult matter of opera and music will be most interesting. The relationship between the fairly broad creative freedom presented by the director and the somewhat “ossified”, traditional opera form and convention will be one of the main topics of the meeting.
The meeting will be hosted by theatre critic Tomasz Domagała, author of the domagalasiekultury.pl blog.
08 February 2020, 9:00 p.m.
Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, os. Szkolne 25
Meeting with Karolina Sofulak
Karolina Sofulak, an opera director recognised both in Poland and abroad, has undertaken the production of Antonín Dvořák’s opera Vanda. In this work, the most interesting seems to be the combination of the Krakow legend with the Czech personality of the composer. During the meeting, we will try to find out if Poland from a distance – the director herself works mainly in Western Europe – really looks different than from within. We will also talk about whether the picture of our country presented by Dvořák is even a little familiar to the director of his work.
The meeting will be hosted by theatre critic Tomasz Domagała, author of the domagalasiekultury.pl blog.
The Opera Rara Festival will take place in Krakow from 23 January to 14 February 2020. The City of Krakow, Krakow Festival Office and Capella Cracoviensis invite you to the festival.
The figure of the fearless, beautiful and wise ancient ruler of Poland, daughter of Prince Krakus, was depicted for the first time in the Polish Chronicle by Wincenty Kadłubek, who wrote: “She surpassed everyone so far in both beauty and charm, that you would think that nature was not generous but profligate with its gifts and blessings. For even the most prudent and the wisest were astonished with her advice, and the cruellest of the enemies became gentle at her sight.” However, it was the subsequent authors who created a canonical version of her biography, focused around her suicide. After she rejected the German prince’s advances, won the war he had declared and finally received fealty and homage from the defeated Germans, Wanda returned to Krakow to offer herself as a sacrifice to the gods in gratitude for her glorious victory. Her body was consumed by the waves of the Vistula. This is how the story is described in Wielkopolska Chronicle and by Jan Długosz in his Annals, who embellished the legend with many colourful details.
In the opera, the causes of conflict are completely different than those described by chroniclers. Christian authors writing in Latin presented Wanda as an indomitable virgin queen, who swore never to marry and therefore consistently rejected all proposals: “it is more fitting for me to call myself a lady than a lordly wife” (Jan Długosz). Dvořák’s librettists present the story from a completely new perspective. In their version, Wanda never swore to keep herself pure. Her decisions stem from a religious conflict, for she is a faithful follower of the Slavic gods, and being the wife of a German ruler would be tantamount to accepting Christianity, and both her and her people were hardly in favour of the new faith. This approach to the subject is not surprising – the opera was written at a time when pan-Slavic ideas had been circulating in the Czech Republic for a long time, competitive neo-Slavicism would emerge shortly afterwards, and Slavicism began to enjoy great popularity in the wake of general anti-Germanic and patriotic sentiments.
The opera speaks of very painful matters, which still remain current in many corners of the world. Religious wars, religious persecution, conversion by force – all this is always marked by terrible cruelty, furious blindness and crazy fanaticism. Even though this has been happening for thousands of years, the question remains unanswered as to why religion, which should direct our minds towards the spiritual world, eternity and transcendence, is able to awaken our primordial instincts and build the most durable walls between people.
From a contemporary perspective, the message of some of themes presented in Vanda seems very questionable. Sure, we might have a protagonist of flesh and bone, a true woman of action, but the question remains about the sense of her sacrifice, which pretty much questions her military success. In the chronicles, her suicide was a thanksgiving for the victory – something that seemed controversial to Długosz – while in the opera, it is the result of a transaction: Wanda promises her life to the gods before the battle in exchange for victory. This removes the theme of her agency, instead we go back to the motif known from many 19th-century operas, prevalent in particular in Wagner’s works, where the corpse of a self-sacrificing woman was the most effective guarantee of restoring order in the world. This time, it will be the director Karolina Sofulak, winner of the European Opera Directing Competition, who will decide on its stage interpretation. She is already well-known in Poland for producing Gounod’s famous Faust at the Grand Theatre in Poznań; however, she works mainly abroad, among others at the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Opera Holland Park and Opéra National de Bordeaux. The difficult late-Romantic score will be tackled by Sinfonietta Cracovia led by Jurek Dybał.
Sometimes a trivial thing is enough for them to ruin the country they are supposed to rule. They divide people, building walls of hostility between them. They destroy their enemies with libel and slander, disregarding the fact that their private vendetta brings doom to whole nations. Interestingly enough, these methods have hardly changed throughout history. These days, we even coined new names for them: “post-truth” was named the 2016 word of the year by the editors of the Oxford Dictionary, “fake news” won a similar distinction a year later, awarded by the creators of Collins English Dictionary. This can bring no good to the general public. All of these truths were embedded by librettist Giuseppe Maria Foppa in his story of the gullible and jealous King Sigismondo, his unscrupulous minister Ladislao, the vengeful King Ulderico of Hungary, the honest Zenovito and Queen Aldimira, the victim of this world of male conflict.
Librettos of Italian operas of the early 19th century do not enjoy a particularly good reputation. Complexity, improbability, conventionality, one-dimensional nature – these sins weigh irrevocably on these old works. Some theatre artists even keep far away from them, believing that apart from their dubious sensationalism and ostentatious melodramatism they have nothing else to offer. The list of accusations often includes a rather liberal approach to history. This happened because after mythological gods and heroes definitely went out of fashion, the focus turned towards authentic heroes and stories referring to “history.” In many cases, you can guess the identity of the protagonists only by their names, because their fates presented by the operas of that time have little to do with their actual lives. One of the most favourite figures of that era was the Queen Elizabeth I of England – Rossini’s and Donizetti’s operas presented numerous fantastic adventures and misfortunes of hers, which were completely unknown even to her biographers.
Foppa went even further. The name of the eponymous protagonist – “Sigismondo” simply means Sigismund in Italian, and the libretto suggests that the opera is about a Polish king. From history lessons, some will probably remember that we had three rulers by that name: First, Sigismund the Old, then Sigismund II Augustus, followed by Sigismund III Vasa. However, after a cursory reading it turns out that Foppa’s romantic libretto does… not cover any of them. Instead, he created a previously unknown king Sigismund of Piast dynasty, who ruled in the country, which had its capital in Gniezno. The idea itself can be simply something to laugh about – just like the Czech coast, to which a ship arrives in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. But… Why do we demand that the contemporaneous authors of an old opera or theatre play stick to facts? Why should they be more diligent than authors who create whole alternative worlds in the imaginary past, or scriptwriters of costume TV series, who often approach history in a similarly liberal manner?
When we stop mocking the alleged naivete of the librettists of old, we may discover a certain depth – not alike Shakespeare’s works, but the story is presented in a skilful manner, and the authors show us history as a game, the outcome of which often depends on individual ambitions, passions and resentments. Rossini’s opera has a moral derived from the tradition of the Enlightenment, which was already outdated at that time. Its optimism would soon disappear from the world of the Italian opera seria, but Sigismondo still offers us a finale with inspirational belief that it is possible to link what seemed to be definitively broken, and that the walls that grew between the characters can be broken down to dust.
The opera, which premiered in 1814 in Venice, will be shown in Poland for the first time. It is directed by Krystian Lada – winner of the prestigious MORTIER Next Generation Award, granted once every two years to a young artist who has already proven their great, promising talent talent at the outset of their career. Capella Cracoviensis will be led by Jan Tomasz Adamus, and the cast will feature a number of excellent performers, led by Argentinian counter-tenor Franco Fagioli.
Two cooperating worlds, of cinema and literature, has recently met in Kraków. The industry event called Word2Picture, which aims at networking between producers and publishers and presenting book novelties with the potential for film adaptation, took place on 25 and 26 October 2019 as part of the Conrad Festival. Although we will have to wait another year for the second edition of the event, the organisers are already announcing another workshop, conducted in cooperation with HBO Polska, educating publishers on how to encourage the film industry to adapt books from their catalogue.
The October event was attended by several dozen producers, screenwriters and directors from several TV stations and labels, including HBO, TVN, Film Produkcja or Akson Studio, as well as key Polish publishers – Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy “Znak”, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Czarne, W.A.B., Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, Powergraph and literary agents. Agnieszka Holland, who talked about the cooperation with the Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk on the screening of her novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, was a special guest of the event.
The producers got acquainted with the specifics of the Polish book market during the panel Book market review for film producers led by Ewa Bolińska-Gostkowska. At the pitching session moderated by Alicja Grawon-Jaksik – expert in business and legal issues in the film sector, as well as president of the National Chamber of Audiovisual Producers – 12 book projects selected as part of an earlier open call were presented. The session was followed by subsequent one-to-one meetings with producers.
The pitching session was preceded by workshops for publishers, which took place on 23 September. During the training conducted by Alicja Grawon-Jaksik, participants talked about which books are particularly sought by producers considering a feature-length or series adaptation, how the film market works and who are the major players. The workshop also included a legal module dedicated to the issue of film contracts, led by advocate Krzysztof Czyżewski, as well as training on the art of pitching itself.
Word2Picture is a bow towards screenwriters, including beginners. This year, the programme included a screenplay masterclass on the basics of film adaptation led by Agnieszka Kruk, screenwriter and founder of StoryLab.pro, as well as a discussion about the most famous Polish adaptation of recent years, i.e. Blinded by the Lights. The meeting What makes the book be movielike? led by Ewa Bolińska-Gostkowska was honoured by the participation of Izabela Łopuch, producer of HBO, and Jakub Żulczyk, who played the double role of author and screenwriter. The hall of the Pauza club in Kraków was bursting at the seams!
The goal of Word2Picture was – and will continue to be – to create a space for cooperation between publishers and film or series producers, to present new productions as well as film and publishing trends, and above all – to gather in one place artists who can lead to the creation of Polish and international productions based on excellent books by Polish authors. See you next year!
This year’s Word2Picture industry meeting was part of the Book Industries section of the 11th Conrad Festival in Kraków.
These works come from different epochs and represent different styles, but are connected by a common thought. They make us wonder why we are so eager to build walls around us, what are the consequences of this, and what to do to build bridges instead of them. Olga Tokarczuk, the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for literature, in an interview given during the Conrad Festival in 2018, spoke about the Palaeolithic settlements built without any fortifications: “Can you imagine that once upon a time people didn’t build walls because there was no need?” In this vision of the distant past, we look at our present, in which the walls – the real and the mental – seem to be growing in number.
What does the opera have to do with it? If we treat it as a fortress separated from the world, in which only the art of beautiful singing is cultivated, probably not much. However, this is a false vision, because opera has always been able to react quickly and sharply – listen to social moods, comment on reality, insult kings, inspire revolts, lead to fury or tame dictators. There is no reason why it shouldn’t tell us about the world here and now. It can do this in two ways – by referring directly to current events or by reflecting them in the mirror of the past.
Hence, this year’s program includes as many as three “historical” operas. “Historical” in the broad sense, because one of them presents a completely fictional history, the second legendary and the third based on facts, but what they all have in common is that they talk about conflicts and the devastating effects of divisions. The first case is Sigismondo” by Rossini, set in the court of the Polish king. However, the work does not portrait one of our rulers of this name, but a fictitious Piast monarch in a country plagued by conflict with Hungary. The 1814 work will be shown in Poland for the first time. Vanda by Dvořák, which presents an episode from the legendary history of Poland, is also poorly known in our country. I don’t think there is a person in our country who doesn’t know the legend of Wanda, who didn’t want to marry a German – and that is what the librettists chose as a starting point. It is an opera about a religious conflict. Queen Wanda is a faithful follower of the Slavic gods and does not agree to accept the proposal of the German duke – and Christianity along with it. War is inevitable. There will also be a work about authentic events and still alive in the collective memory – Weiße Rose. Udo Zimmermann approached the musical elaboration of the history of the German anti-Nazi resistance group White Rose three times. In 1967, he wrote an opera to a libretto by Ingo Zimmermann; he developed another version of the opera the following year. The planned production at the Hamburg Opera in 1986 was to include further adaptations, but instead he decided to write a new work on the same subject, this time to the libretto by Wolfgang Willaschk. The result was a completely different work, devoid of plot and focused on the inner experiences of the two protagonists: the Scholl siblings just before their execution in a Nazi prison.
Unknown, I Live with You is a direct commentary on our present. The opera-installation was inspired by the poems of Afghan women poets – their personal statements, undistorted by their husbands, fathers, brothers and biased media. The authors took part in a project designed to encourage women to express themselves through words and tell their own stories. Most of them took part in the project in secret.
There are other divisions that the Il ballo delle Ingrate (Ballet of the Ungrateful Women) tells us about. This perverse courtly morality play by Monteverdi considers the border between life and death, between people and gods, as well as between men and women. From today’s perspective, it makes us think about whether we, living in the modern times, are not disturbed by the visions of the gender relations presented in the work. The performance at the Opera Rara Festival will break another wall: the one that divides the worlds of contemporary and early music. The bridge between 17th-century Italy and Poland in the 21st century will be built by the composer of the young generation, Teoniki Rożynek.
Alfred Tennyson is a poet rarely read in our country, and who is not as famous as his older Romantic colleagues, such as Shelley, Keats or Coleridge. Meanwhile, in the British Isles, his “Enoch Arden” is considered to be the most classic poem of the Victorian era. Thanks to the festival, we will have the opportunity to discover this story anew – in a performance combining the music of Richard Strauss with the performance of professional and amateur actors. In his poetic novel, the British writer described the story as the reverse of The Odyssey: the fisherman Enoch returns home from a ten-year wandering journey and discovers that his wife, convinced that her husband has been dead for a long time, married another man. The whole project will be directed by Mira Mańka, a student of the Faculty of Drama Directing at the AST National Academy of Theatre Arts in Krakow, and Dominika Peszko will sit at the piano.
The Opera Rara Festival will run from 23 January to 14 February 2020 in Krakow. Tickets and passes for the festival will be available for sale from 30 October 2019 at InfoKraków points and on the Eventim.pl website.
Are you a novice writer or translator? Do you want to develop your skills and establish international contacts? We look forward to receiving your application by the 3rd of November! The CELA project is launching!
If you are a novice writer or translator, this call for applications is for you! The next edition of the CELA (Connecting Emerging Literary Artists) project – an international talent development programme – is going to launch soon. Thirty writers and eighty translators from ten European countries will have the opportunity to develop their literary skills and promote their work abroad. The Krakow Festival Office is announcing a call for applications for a competition to select three writers and nine translators of less popular languages into Polish in order to establish a Polish team for the upcoming edition of the programme. We are waiting for your applications until 3 November.
What is CELA?
CELA is an international, four-year programme, running in 2019–2023, offering three emerging Polish authors the opportunity to meet artists from other European countries, take part in educational courses, consult their work with mentors and present it to publishers and literary agents at festivals in Poland and abroad.
A text sample submitted by the author as part of this call of applications, as well as all subsequent ones prepared during the courses and residencies, will be translated into eight European languages by translators recruited during the selection process. The texts will be available on the project’s web platform.
The CELA project will also involve nine emerging Polish translators who will translate texts from the native languages of the organisations involved in the project: Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Portuguese, Czech, Slovenian, Romanian and Dutch. The participating translators will also be able to take part in training courses abroad and consult their translations with foreign mentors and experienced Polish translators.
Eleven organisations from ten countries (Belgium, Czechia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia and Spain) are involved in the next edition of the CELA project. An overview of all organisations involved in the project can be found here.
International travels of writers and translators, as well as literary courses and residencies are fully financed thanks to the support of the European Union under the Creative Europe Programme.
Terms and conditions:
We are looking for writers:
- Living in Poland, writing prose in Polish;
- With a good command of English, both spoken and written;
- With at least a few years of writing experience, who have published their first book and/or made their debut in magazines (including on-line);
- With experience in presenting their texts to the public;
- Whose texts have not been translated into more than one of the CELA languages (Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Portuguese, Czech, Slovenian, Romanian and Dutch);
- Currently working on a new prose text;
- Motivated to broaden their horizons and ready to engage in international training courses and residencies during a four-year project.
- Participation in national talent development programmes and creative writing courses will also be welcome.
If you are interested, please send your resume, a one-page cover letter and a fragment of your prose (up to 2000 characters) to oliwia.fryc@biurofestiwalowe.pl The deadline for submitting applications is 3 November.
We are looking for translators:
- Translating from Polish into one of the CELA languages (Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Portuguese, Czech, Slovenian, Romanian and Dutch);
- With a good command of English;
- Graduates of university translation studies/courses;
- Starting their translation career, but with some initial experience, which is confirmed by recently completed jobs and commissions.
If you are interested, please send your resume and a one-page cover letter to oliwia.fryc@biurofestiwalowe.pl The deadline for submitting applications is 3 November.
The results of the 2017-2019 CELA project can be found here.
The Mayor of the City of Krakow Jacek Majchrowski made a decision to establish the PRIMEVAL FOREST in Nowa Huta’s Kujawy neighbourhood in connection with Olga Tokarczuk winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in order to celebrate and commemorate the writer’s achievement by Krakow – UNESCO City of Literature. Join us on 29th October at 10:00 a.m. to plant trees together. The event will be part of the Conrad Festival taking place in Krakow at that time.
“We were delighted to hear the verdict of the Swedish Academy, who awarded Olga Tokarczuk with the Nobel Prize for literature” says Jacek Majchrowski, Mayor of the City of Krakow. “In order to celebrate and commemorate the writer’s success, we decided to plant a forest and name it ‘Primeval’, as a direct reference to one of her books – Primeval and Other Times. The new forest will stay with us forever”, he added.
In the first sentence of the book we read that Primeval is found in the centre of the Universe. As a UNESCO City of Literature, Krakow is the centre of the literary universe, and Olga Tokarczuk has always played a key role in this centre. It is also worth mentioning that the writer considers the ecological crisis and issues of animal rights to be absolutely paramount – she has written about them numerous times, as well as mentioned them many times at meetings with readers all over the world.
The PRIMEVAL FOREST is a joint initiative of the City of Krakow, the Management Board of Green Areas in Krakow and the Krakow Festival Office – operator of the Krakow – UNESCO City of Literature programme. The planting is carried out in connection with the “District Afforestation Programme for the City of Krakow in 2018-2040” run by the Management Board of Green Areas in Krakow. The Kujawy neighbourhood of Nowa Huta will gain 5 hectares new forest, which will house 25,000 seedlings of English oaks, small-leaved limes and beech trees.
The joint planting will take place in plot No 118/2 obr. 40 Nowa Huta. Join us on 29 October 2019 at 10.00 a.m. You can get to the plot from Dymarek Street.
10 October 2019 will go down in the history of Polish literature. Olga Tokarczuk received one of the two Nobel Prizes in Literature awarded today by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
Olga Tokarczuk has long been listed among the candidates for the Nobel Foundation prize, alongside writers such as Margaret Atwood, Maryse Condé and Haruki Murakami. Her strong international standing was confirmed by the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft) and her nomination to the finals of the British award in 2019 – this time for Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones). The writer’s popularity was also reflected in her nominations for one of the most important American literary awards, the National Book Award. After being recognised twice by the award jury for her Flights and Drive Your Plow…, Tokarczuk’s prose began to intensely resonate in the collective consciousness of readers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Today, on 10 October at 1:00 p.m. at Stockholm’s Börshuset in the Old Town, Olga Tokarczuk received probably the most prestigious prize awarded to writers – the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Polish writer was awarded for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. The Polish writer won the 2018 Prize.
This is great news for Polish readers, and Krakow has even more reasons to celebrate, said Urszula Chwalba, Head of the Literary Department of the Krakow Festival Office, operator of the Krakow UNESCO City of Literature. Olga Tokarczuk has been a friend of the Conrad Festival since its first editions. During each of the meetings with the writer, the festival halls were bursting at the seams. In 2018, she took part in an extraordinary musical project: the Sacrum Profanum Festival in Krakow hosted the premiere of the opera “Ahat ili. Sister of the Gods” with libretto by the writer, based on her novel “Anna In in the Tombs of the World”.
Olga Tokarczuk is a writer, essayist, screenwriter, poet and psychologist. Her most important novels include The Journey of the Book-People (1993), Primeval and Other Times (1996), House of Day, House of Night (1998), Flights (2007), Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead (2009) and The Books of Jacob (2014). Her latest release is the collection of Bizarre Stories (2018). She is also a laureate of the Kościelski Award (1997), Paszport Polityki Award (1997) and the Vilenica – Slovenian International Literary Prize (2013). She has been nominated five times for the Nike Literary Award, which she received twice: in 2008 for her novel Flights, and in 2015 for The Books of Jacob. Her House of Day, House of Night was awarded the prestigious Brücke Berlin-Preis Prize (2002). Her books have been translated into many languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Russian, Czech, Ukrainian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese and Hindi. In 2016, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was adapted into Spoor, with a script by the writer, based on the book, and directed by Agnieszka Holland. The film won the Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2017.
This is the fifth Nobel Prize in Literature in the hands of a Polish author. Previous winners included Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), Władysław Reymont (1924), Czesław Miłosz (1980) and Wisława Szymborska (1996).
The 2019 award went to Peter Handke for his influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.
Krakow and Québec City – UNESCO Cities of Literature are joining forces and opening up to literary exchange of experiences. On November this year, our city will be visited by Canadian writer Philippe Girard. In the meantime, Krakow-based author Aleksandra Zielińska, known to a broader audience for her novel Sorge, published this year under the auspices of the Krakow – UNESCO City of Literature – will travel to Québec.
The month-long residency programme run by Krakow and Québec is the first instance of literary collaboration of both these cities as part of the UNESCO programme. Québec – the capital of the Canadian province of the same name, sometimes referred to as Ville de Québec in French or Quebec City in English, is famous for its dynamic, lively literary scene, which seduces the artists who come there from near and far. Aleksandra Zielińska, who won the competition for a scholarship stay announced in July by Krakow – UNESCO City of Literature, will get a chance to explore the phenomenon of this city and take advantage of its creative atmosphere. She will spend one month in the Maison de la littérature. Zielińska wrote several novels, including Przypadek Alicji, Bura i szał, Sorge and a collection of short stories titled Kijanki i kretowiska. “Given its problematic scope, her prose is extremely consistent. Her latest release proves that this young, talented writer (born in 1989) is in fact a ‘monographic artist’ who always remains faithful to one subject – the crisis of women”, wrote Dariusz Nowacki for Gazeta Wyborcza. Aleksandra Zielińska won the A. Włodek Award. She has been nominated for the Conrad Award, the W. Gombrowicz Award and the Gdynia Award. She was a laureate of the Young Poland scholarship, creative scholarship of the City of Krakow and many others. She is one of the members of the literary team at Munk Studio.
The commission made up of experts from both Cities of Literature chose the representative of the literary community of Québec. Wisława Szymborska’s flat, vacated by Paszport Polityki Award laureate Małgorzata Rejmer, will be visited by Philippe Girard, author of more than a dozen comic books, five novels for children and numerous short stories. His works were appreciated not only in Canada, but also in Japan, France, and Serbia. One of his short stories – “Danger public” – became the foundation for Leif Tande’s comic book under the same title. Next year, the story will be adapted for the silver screen. During his stay in Krakow, Girard will work on American Roulette – his latest magical realism novel about a war veteran whose life takes a drastic turn for the worse as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder – he ends up on the street and becomes a beggar.
During their stay, the residents are obliged to write a short text inspired by the city. This year’s exchange is the first instalment of a programme addressed to writers, poets and translators from Krakow and Québec – Cities of Literature, belonging to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, aimed at giving creators and authors a chance to present their works to foreign audiences, fostering greater diversity in the literary community and facilitating establishing contacts with writers living and working in a partnering country.