New Literature from Europe 2013: In Transit Featuring Witold Szablowski at Ohio State University and in New York

EU passport holders are in transit, working, traveling, living and functioning easily over most of the continent, and European writers are articulating a new consciousness of this state of motion. Some of these authors are foreigners in their homeland, and some are at home in a foreign land. Some inhabit spaces where borders and populations have shifted. They may write in their mother tongue for an audience that reads in another language, possibly translated through a third language, or they may write in more than one language. Several of them move easily between fiction informed by fact and non-fiction driven by narrative.

NLE\'s authors for 2013 are: Erri de Luca, Italy\'s most widely read author and an international best seller; Bulgarian-German author Ilija Trojanow, who has written books about India and Mecca and who was recently barred from entering the US, presumably for his outspoken positions on US surveillance in Europe; Laurent Binet, author of the internationally acclaimed WWII novel set in Prague, HHhH; leading Czech novelist, Jáchym Topol; up-and-coming Polish journalist based mostly in Turkey, Witold Szablowski; Romanian writer Daniela Zeca-Buzura, who also makes a European connection to the Near East; Spanish writer, Maria Dueñas, who explores the Madrid-Morocco connection during the Spanish Civil War; Romanian-born Hungarian writer, György Dragomán; and Sabine Gruber, an Austrian writer who has been equally at home in Italy.

Award-winning journalist Witold Szablowski (b. 1980), one of the youngest accomplished writers associated with the Polish school of literary reportage, following in the footsteps of the Ryszard Kapuscinski. He has written about Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, about illegal immigration to the EU, and about his generation\'s relationship to Communism in Poland, but his book, The Assassin from Apricot City (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, London: Stork Press, Nov 2013), collects his stories from Turkey, where he has spent much of the last several years, earning a degree in Political Science in Istanbul and working for CNN Turk as well as Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland\'s leading independent daily. Before he comes to New York, he will also have an reading and book signing at Ohio State University along with an interview with the Columbus Council on World Affairs that will be broadcast live on the internet.

The festival is organized by the New York branches of the Austrian Cultural Forum, Czech Center, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Goethe-Institut, Hungarian Cultural Center, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Polish Cultural Institute, Romanian Cultural Institute, and Instituto Cervantes, within the framework of EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture), in collaboration with the Center for Fiction, Melville House, the New York Public Library, McNally Jackson, InTranslation (The Brooklyn Rail) and Words Without Borders.

New Literature from Europe Festival website with author bios and excerpts
More about Witold Szablowski
Events Schedule