There's No Life Without Ideals - 16th Prague Writers’ Festival

on 31-05-2006 03:06

Published in : , Words

previewed by Andre Rabe

If you happen to spot a distinguished looking African man with a splendid white afro near Theatre Minor in Vodičková Street this June, chances are you will have seen Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. He and other acclaimed writers will be descending on Prague for this year’s 16th annual Prague Writers’ Festival from 4 to 7 June.

Wole Soyinka

Playwrghts, poets, essayists and authors from as far afield as Mexico and Israel have been invited to participate. You may recognize some of your favorites among these: Hana Androniková, Howard Brenton, Sarah Churchwell, Michael Cunnigham, Jorie Graham, Jaroslav Holubek, Robert Menasse, Monika Načeva, Jorge Semprún, Ahron Shabtai, Jáchym Topol, Vassilis Vassilikos and Jorge Volpi. Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, for instance, wrote The Hours, which has been successfully turned into a major motion picture. Hana Androniková caused a stir on the Czech literary scene in 2001 with her award-winning debut novel Zvuk Slunečních Hodin (The Sound of the Sundial). Novelist and screenwriter, Jorge Semprún, who survived a Nazi concentration camp, wrote the scripts for Z and Le Guerre est finie, which were both nominated for Oscars, and his works have been translated into over twenty languages. At the tender age of 11, when most of us were safely ensconced in our homes, perhaps reading our first novels, Wole Soyinka was actively involved in the protest movement which eventually freed Nigeria from British rule. The name of his 1976 collection of essays, Myth, Literature and the African World, which followed many earlier publications, political imprisonment, exiles, praise and persecution, might well be an appropriate epithet for the legendary man himself.

Hana Androniková

The Festival, too, has its roots in a liberation struggle. It can be traced back to Keats House in London in 1980. It was here, in collaboration with the literary journal Index on Censorship, that works and authors from Central and Eastern were brought to the capital and to the attention of the British public. Fresh after the fall of communism, the Festival moved to Prague, opening in Valdštejnský Palác in May 1991 with a symposium of 20 Czech authors who had opposed the communist regime. Since then the Festival has grown into one of the most important cultural events in Europe and has been recognized as a Czech cultural foundation since 1997.

This year’s event is dedicated to the great American playwright, Arthur Miller, who passed away in February last year at the age of 89. He will long be remembered for his dramatic works, most notably, Death Of A Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), and for his no-less-dramatic life, recorded in his intimate autobiography Timebends (1987). Miller’s works grapple with the concept of America and the idea, or sometimes the illusion and delusion, of the American dream. It seems fitting then, that, near the zenith of his career, he married the American icon, Marilyn Monroe.

Miller was also a stalwart supporter of the Index on Censorship and championed the rights of dissident writers in the former Soviet bloc. He even paid a visit to Prague in 1969 in the dismal aftermath of the Prague Spring in order to encourage writers in Central Europe that “their colleagues in the West had not forgotten them“. Indeed, the Prague Writers’ Festival, with its combination of world-class authors, international media coverage and live internet broadcasts, is still fulfilling that promise.

Users' Comments

Average user rating

(0 vote)

Add your comment

[+] Show form

[-] Hide form

Only registered users can comment an article. Please login or register.

No comment posted

< Prev		Next >

[ Back ]