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ANNOUNCEMENT
HERCULE POIROT IS COMING TO SKOPJE SKOPJE TOGETHER WITH SOPHIE HANNAH!!!!
4 10.2023, Skopje The followers of the BookStar Festival follow the full program of this year's edition with great attention, and tonight's event brings special excitement, i.e. the exclusive meeting with Sophie Hannah called "the new Agatha Christie", because she is the only author who in forty years time was allowed by the heirs and family of Agatha Christie to write sequel novels with Hercule Poirot. The event is entitled "I - Agatha Christie, I - Sophie Hanna" and sign language interpretation is provided. The writer comes to "BookStar" during a period when she is extremely busy with writing and university lectures and a period when she refuses all international visits. She stays in Skopje for only 24 hours and her visit is surely among the literary events of the year! "Anthologist" prepared another surprise. In addition to the appearance of Sophie Hanna, Hercule Poirot 's visit to Skopje has also been announced, and readers will be able to meet them tonight at the Youth Cultural Center from 8:00 p.m.
Student meetings with the guest writers of "BookStar"
An exceptional and rich program was realized on the second day of the festival of European literature "BookStar", with all-day activities and events. In the morning, the students from the Department of Slavic studies at the "Blaže Koneski" Faculty of Philology met Lucie Faulerová, a Czech writer, editor and screenwriter, whose debut novel "Dust Collectors" aroused interest among readers and critics immediately after its publication, and was nominated for "Magnesia Litera", the highest annual literary award in the Czech Republic, Najat El Hachmi, this year's winner of the "BookStar" award, a Moroccan-Spanish writer who writes on feminist topics, had a meeting with the students.
Special attention of the audience was aroused by the event in the City Library "Miladinovci Brothers" - Skopje - a literary reading with an inventive title and an even more inventive concept - "You Don't Tire Me" in which nine European and nine Macedonian authors participated in a literary event: Najat El Hachmi (Spain), Miljenko Jergović (Croatia/BiH), Anja Mugerli (Slovenia), Francis Kirps (Luxembourg), Lucie Faulerová (Czech Republic), Stefan Hertmans (Belgium), Branko Rosić (Serbia), Drago Glamuzina (Croatia), Aleksandar Šurbatović (Serbia), Vlada Urošević, Lidija Dimkovska, Josip Kocev, Katerina Šoško, Davor Stojanovski, Nikolina Andova-Šopova, Ande Jankov, Simona Jovanoska, Aleksandar Rusjakov.
Literature as a pastime is vulgar, simple, it should be banned by law
The evening was reserved for a conversation with the favorite authors of the Macedonian readership, Miljenko Jergović (Croatia/BiH) and Lidija Dimkovska (Macedonia). Jergović and Dimkovska now sat next to each other for the first time in a literary conversation, although their work is so amenable to such a thing. Miljenko Jergović is a Bosnian-Croatian writer and journalist, one of the most significant Balkan writers, who with his literary and non-literary work rose to become one of the most colorful figures on the regional public scene. His short stories and novels have been translated into thirty languages. Jergović currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.
Lidija Dimkovska, on the other hand, is a poet, novelist, essayist and translator, who has been living in Ljubljana, Slovenia since 2001, working as a writer and translator from Romanian and Slovenian into the Macedonian language.
The BookStar audience truly enjoyed the inspiring conversation with these exceptional authors. The event was moderated by Aleksandar Madjarovski (The Reader) and Biljana Crvenkovska. The main topics of the evening were home and domesticity, homeland, writing in a foreign environment, the Balkans and its curses and blessings.
- I felt my double identity even today, when I first took a photo with the foreign authors, and then in the other group, with the domestic ones. The Balkans is absolutely fascinating, it inspires and provokes me in literature, everything that is ugly, all that chaos is suitable for literature. Maybe in life order and peace are desirable, but in literature it is totally the opposite - said Dimkovska.
According to Jergović, today's predominance of autofiction, for writers to write their own lives, is tempting, cool, there is something reassuring in it, but behind all that there is a positive deception, because storytelling in itself is fiction, it cannot be autofiction. Human lives are by nature fascinating and fantastic. Such are the stories that were once told in the compartments of the Yugoslav railway, and I think that the biggest trouble is not the disintegration of Yugoslavia, but the railway itself, we lost that opportunity to listen to those stories - said Jergović at the beginning of the conversation in the "Frosina" cinema in YCC.
Speaking about the notions of home, the topic of one's own homeland also began.
- The Macedonian word for it is wonderful - fatherland. The Croats appropriated domovina, and the Serbs otadzbina, although both words belonged to the Serbo-Croatian language. Macedonians have that word fatherland, which from our Serbian-Croatian perspective, sounds gentle and somewhat comical. Because those Macedonian patriarchal fathers, against whom the Macedonian daughters fight, get a reduced meaning with the word fatherland, father, dad... it sounds softer than father. Hence there is something sad about the word reserve fatherland, which Lidija uses. It essentially means that you are without a homeland. You left one and acquired the other, but that cannot be acquired, the homeland is not a car, so you can buy it. And we all actually have a strange psychotic situation, we have all been left without a great homeland, which they convinced us was everything, and then they convinced us that we should be ashamed of it, of everything. Let's treat Yugoslavia as a forbidden sexuality, so that all of us in these areas have a serious domestic-sexual problem that we become aware of when we stay alone at home - said Jergović.
For Dimkovska, identity issues, which she faced especially after leaving Macedonia, became especially important for her literature, they became manageable literary material. Jergović, on the other hand, said that he feels like a stranger everywhere, both in Zagreb and in Bosnia, except in his own living spaces,
but when he crosses the threshold of the house - he is already abroad.
- And the older I get, the less interested I am in going to the real foreign country, to Palma, for example, or to Cuba. I don't know what I would do with them in a literary sense. I have too many territories to climb instead of the Himalayas and think about such a position... This area that stretches from Trieste to Thessaloniki is fantastic for literature, although perhaps not for a comfortable civil life - said Jergović.
Speaking about what is good literature, Lidia said that these are the writers and books with which she can identify, to wonder how they write about her, and they don't even know her, with such books she experiences catharsis and knowledge. Jergović pointed out that literature must not amuse, that literature should disturb because the consolation is in the disturbance, and the opposite of that is not despair, but dullness, dullness, frozenness.
- Literature as a pastime is vulgar, simple, it should be banned by law. It should not talk about general topics, but about specific places, people, good literature is always local. And most importantly, it is not fashion - Jergović concluded.
The text is a palimpsest, sometimes you have to stop to see how the story unfolds
At 8:00 p.m., in the Youth Cultural Center, "Frosina" cinema, a conversation was held with the authors Stefan Hertmans (Belgium) - author of "Forever Stranger" and Francis Kirps (Luxembourg) - author of "Mutations". They talked about their books, about stories and their creation, about creative ways of writing.
Stefan Hertmans (1951) is a Flemish-speaking Belgian author, poet and essayist. His biography reads like an educational (bildungs) novel. From teacher to jazz musician, from professor to writer, from Belgian state laureate to huge international literary star.
He is the author of a literary and essayistic opus that includes poetry, novels, essays, plays, short stories. His poetry has been translated into various languages, studied at the Art Institute and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, and in 1983 he participated in the Struga Poetry Evenings.
He has an impressive resume, having taught at the Sorbonne University, the universities of Vienna, Berlin and Mexico City, the Library of Congress in Washington and University College London. At the meeting in YCC, he spoke about the novel "War and Turpentine" (2012, which he based on his grandfather's diaries through which he reconstructs the time before, during and after the First World War, with which he entered the wider list for the international Booker Prize .
In Macedonian, "Antolog" published his book "Forever Stranger" (2016).
- It is a novel in which there are facts and fiction. I did a lot of research to write it. I wanted to know who that girl was, that distinguished Christian noblewoman who leaves her previous life for the love of a Jewish boy and travels from France to Egypt. I followed those tracks and made fascinating discoveries. I like that kind of literary play. When you discover something that happened a thousand years ago and then you add your imagination. I think I made an interesting reconstruction of an incredible journey from medieval Europe to Egypt and an untold story of forgotten documents and forbidden love – said Hеrtmans.
According to him, the text is always a palimpsest, sometimes you have to stop writing to see how the story develops.
Francis Kirps (Luxembourg), on the other hand, is a Luxembourgish author, satirist and journalist. After finishing high school, he studied psychology in Strasbourg and worked, among other things, as a school psychologist and a primary school teacher. Since the nineties, he has been publishing poetry and prose in various anthologies and magazines in Germany and Luxembourg. In 2020, he received the Servais Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature for the book "Mutations", which was translated into 5 languages, including Macedonian. “Mutations” consists of 7 stories and 1 poem, each based on a classic text, from Little Red Riding Hood to Virginia Woolf.
– I take authors I know and then pay homage to them, writing my own stories, turning their stories upside down. The first text I wrote of “Mutations” was based on Kafka, and I wrote it for a literary magazine in Luxembourg. Then others followed, some successful, some less successful, and that's how the concept of the book was born. The idea was to show that many of the classic texts are still alive and that they can be given a new dimension, of course with due respect to them. "Mutations" are a kind of tribute to those works and their authors. However, I do not believe that I will continue with this concept, I think that it has served its purpose and that it is a finished concept. I don't want to repeat myself - Kirps said.
Today on the program
October 4th, 11.00 a.m. - Skopje
“When a Writer Guides Writers”
Informal City Tour with Vasko Markovski
October 4th, 4:30 p.m. – Europe House – Skopje
(Im)possible Match – Author and Translator
Panel within "Made in Europe: The Power of Diversity"
Lucie Faulerová (Czech Republic) and Margareta Karajanova
Francis Kirps (Luxembourg) and Ksenija Čočkova
Anja Mugerli (Slovenia) and Davor Stojanovski
Žarko Kujundjiski and Mariangela Biancofiore (Italy)
Moderator: Duško Krstevski
October 4th, 6:30 p.m. – Pocket Cinema, YCC
"Naked lunch" podcast with Duško Krstevski and Najat El Hachmi (Spain)
October 4th, 7:00 p.m. – Cinema "Frosina"
"At the Center of Life"
Conversation with Lucie Faulerová (Czech Republic) and Anja Mugerli (Slovenia)
Moderators: Aleksandar Madjarovski and Ana Golejška Djikova
October 4th, 8:00 p.m. – Cinema "Frosina"
"I - Agatha Christie, I - Sophie Hannah"
Conversation with author Sophie Hannah (United Kingdom)
Moderators: Jordan Kocevski and Ande Jankov
October 4th, 9:00 p.m. – Cinema "Frosina"
Slam competition
Participants: Francis Kirps (Luxembourg), Perica Sardjoski, Marija Grubor, Lile Jovanoska, Igor Trpčeski, Gorazd Kenny Kitanovski, Anica Blaževska, Andrej Al-Asadi
In the period from October 2-4, everyone has the opportunity to meet the authors during BookStar 2023.
The festival is held under the slogan "Please do disturb" and is supported by the Ministry of Culture, the literary network Traduki, EU with YOU, the publishing house "Antolog", and separate events from the Czech Literary Center, the Center for Flemish Literature, the European Union, the Cultural and Information Center of the Republic of Bulgaria in Skopje and the Embassies of the Czech Republic, Spain and Belgium. The festival program will take place in several locations in Skopje. Media sponsor of the event is the Macedonian Radio Television. The visual identity is the authorship of Vladimir Trajanovski,, Тhe festival video was created by Radmila Vankoska.
@antolog_mk
@bookstar_festival
Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPMeZZYy8_NAAGJ4bUR3OeA
