27 October 2011 Literary Main Market Square – from the 2nd of November
From the 2nd of November, the Main Market Square will turn into a space filled with superb literature. In the bookshops around the Main Market Square you will find posters and leaflets with the programme of the Conrad Festival and some of the bookshops will prepare special windwo displays for the duration of the festival. Additionally, there will be plenty of attractions for the readers fond of personal meetings with writers. At 4 pm on the first day of the Festival (Wednesday, the 2nd of November), the Hetmańska bookshop (Rynek Główny 17) will host a meeting with Jacek Dehnel, and at 12 noon on Saturday, with Fleur Jaeggy and Roberto Calasso. Also on Saturday (the 5th of November) at 1 pm at the Matrass bookshop (Rynek Główny 23), the readers will meet Maciej Zaremba.
Fleur Jaeggy is an eminent Italian writer born in Zurich, but living in Milan since 1968. It was in Milan that the author met Thomas Bernhard and Ingebor Bachmann, and also her husband, Roberto Calsso, a famous Italian essayist and publisher. Her book, I beati anni del castigo gained her the Premio Bagutta prize in 1989. Josip Brodski said about the book, “To read it takes about 4 hours – the memory of the book remains for a lifetime.” Read more.
Roberto Calasso – Italian writer, essayist, head of the Adelphi publishing house, Calsso studied English literature at La Sapienza University in Rome. In 1962, he began working at Adelphi Edizioni. He belongs to the elite of European intellectuals and is compared to Erich Auerbach and Ernest Robert Curtius. His books include L’impuro folie (1974) and La rovina di Kasch (1983). The Polish readership knows him primarily as the author of the book on Greek myths, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (1988), translated to Polish by Stanisław Kasprzysiak and published in 1995. Read more.
Maciej Zaremba – A Swedish journalist of Polish descent, columnist and translator of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry. After his post-high school exams, he immigrated to Sweden in 1969 along with his mother, grandmother and brothers. He worked as a delivery person, a hospital attendant, an operator of a crane at a construction site – this is the way he learned life and language. He studied film history and history of ideas. Zaremba launched his career as a journalist in 1981 by writing reports from Poland on the emerging Solidarity movement. He then returned to Poland during Martial Law as a truck driver, and was among those who helped the Polish democratic opposition (in 2005, he was given a medal on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity movement). He works for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, writing on culture and politics. Read more.
