November 2, 2023 6-10 PM
Ukrainian Institute of America | 2 East 79th Street, New York
A journey across cultures, languages, and stories: Europe’s leading literary voices converge at the Ukrainian Institute of America for a celebration of international literature
NEW YORK — European Literature Night returns to New York on November 2nd with a celebration of stories, authors, and cultures from across the continent. Annually, the event 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. Presented by members of EUNIC New York cluster in collaboration with PEN America, the evening will feature multilingual readings, a musical performance, panel discussions and Q&As, introducing the audience to the best of contemporary European literature.
Authors, translators, and performers representing 11 European countries will gather 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. The program will feature two panel discussions:
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND GLOBAL CRISES
Moderated by Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, Chief Program Officer, Literary Programming at PEN America
The contemporary writer is a writer in a time of upheaval. Today, European writers write at a moment where instability looms and they are confronted with the human impact of global migration, the danger of the climate crisis, the long tail of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the devastating war in Ukraine. Readers turn to writers for a better understanding of the pivotal political and cultural moments that shape how European citizens live, dream of the future, and wrestle with their national identity and competing interests within the larger political and economic union. 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 (Estonia), Anja Kampmann (Germany), Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine) Sanaë Lemoine (France), and Kat Mustatea (Romania).
THE PAST IS PRESENT
Moderated by Sabir Sultan, Associate Director, World Voices Festival and Literary Programs at PEN AmericaWhile the historian’s work of excavating the past offers invaluable revelations about the current political landscape of Europe, writers employ literary imagination to create insights into who we are, what happened, and what comes next. They dare to ask how we might build more prosperous and democratic futures. How are we shaped by the stories of the Holocaust? What is the role of traditional myths and folklore? What are the untold stories or subversive narratives created to critique autocratic regimes and societies? 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-Zajac (Poland), Lore Segal (Austria), Laima Vincė Sruoginis (Lithuania), Kateřina Tučková (Czechia), and Kirmen Uribe (Spain – Basque Country).
“Our program brings together authors that write in at least ten languages,” says Jaanika Peerna, president of the EUNIC New York cluster. “Yet their voices traverse linguistic barriers and national boundaries. Literature enables us to understand the collective human experience, finding unity in our shared stories, on the page and in person.”
“PEN America is honored to partner with EUNIC-New York to present European Literature Night,” says Sabir Sultan, “In an era of great political and cultural divide, this gathering of writers from eleven countries is a powerful reminder that storytelling brings people together across language, racial, and geographical barriers, while elevating a common humanity and uniting us through the power of literature and free expression.”
The program will also include a special performance celebrating the 100th birth anniversary of Portuguese poets Natália Correia, Eugénio de Andrade, and Mário Cesariny, with readings of their poetry, accompanied by the Portuguese guitar played by Pedro Henriques da Silva.
Free and open to the public. Space is limited. Registration via Eventbrite is required.
More information available here.
The evening is organized by the Czech Center New York, EUNIC New York and Ukrainian Institute of America with the collaboration of partnering cultural institutions and consulates: Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Camōes Institute, Consulate General of Estonia in New York, Etxepare Basque Institute, The Embassy of France in the U.S., Goethe Institut New York, Lithuanian Cultural Institute, Polish Cultural Institute in New York, Romanian Cultural Institute, Consulate General of Portugal in New York, Ukrainian Institute of America, Villa Albertine, and PEN America, and the support of the European Union Delegation to the United Nations.
Select books will be available for sale and author signing. For those who can’t make it in person, an edited presentation of the evening will be available on Trafika Europe Radio.
About EUNIC New York
EUNIC – European Union National Institutes for Culture – is the European network of organizations working in 90 countries worldwide through a network of 125 clusters and acting as a platform for promoting European values, sharing knowledge, building capacity amongst its members and partners, and engaging local partners in dialogue and common cultural projects. Created in 2007, the New York cluster of EUNIC, bringing together around 40 cultural missions from the European Union, is working in partnership to strengthen the transatlantic dialogue and cultural cooperation and showcase European values and creativity.
Media contacts:
Dalia Stoniene/StudioStripe NYC
T: 718-316-5509 / E: dalia@studiostripe.nyc
Katerina Lion Gregorová
T: 551-482-6222 / E: lion@czechcenter.com
PARTICIPANTS & BOOKS
AUSTRIA | Lore Segal: Ladies’ Lunch
Melville House, 2023
From the master of the 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 it’s functioning depends on his labor.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
