6 November 2012 The fifth CONRAD special insert
Tomorrow’s Tygodnik Powszechny will include the first CONRAD special insert after the end of the Conrad Festival, with a summary of this year’s edition of the Festival. The insert includes:
- Grzegorz Jankowicz about the 4th edition of the Conrad Festival: “The objective of the Conrad Festival is to create a bridge between writers and readers, to gather the people that wish to talk about the most interesting and the most important problems of the modern world in one place”;
- Readers talking with Jeanette Winterson about her debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in which she used autobiographical elements related to the experiences of a young homosexual woman and her artistic workshop: “Adoption means certain narrative limitations. It is a bit like reading a book with the several first pages pulled out. The feeling of something having been lost never leaves you . . . This feeling gives birth to a story. The beginning that is not there makes you go creative. Things that are not there must be invented.”;
- Interview with Andrzej Stasiuk about his latest novel, Grochów, where death (of grandma, the dog, a writer and friend) is the central theme. A story about living through the death of the close and not so close ones, on the feeling of loss, on friendship, and also about the need for religious language that has been taken away from us and which the writer attempts to recreate. “I consider myself a religious writer,” Stasiuk says. “I have a deep feeling that there is no religious language now. This is horrible! Not that there is God or there is no God, but that our daily life is devoid of religious narration that helps us answer these questions with no shame”;
- Reports from the Conrad Festival by Grzegorz Nurek, and a selection of quotes from festival guests.
