This week, our editors from around the world report on a controversial book prize winner in Slovakia, a comic strip festival in Belgium, and a moving performance of a collection of short stories centered on gay life in Puerto Rico. Read on to find out more!
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Slovakia
Throughout June, ten writers longlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, presented their works online, at events in the capital, Bratislava, and the open-air summer festival Pohoda held at Trenčín airfield. However, much attention was paid to a major controversy surrounding one of the nominated books, Nicol Hochholczerová’s remarkable debut Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room Can’t be Eaten Up), which depicts the relationship between a 12-year-old schoolgirl and her teacher, a man in his fifties. While there is universal agreement on the book‘s literary merits—it is among the five works on the award’s shortlist, announced on 7 September—the decision to also nominate it for the René Prize—a competition in which students of selected secondary schools choose a winner from five books—raised concerns that neither the 18-year-old students nor their teachers are equipped to handle sensitive subject without specialist psychological support. Fearing the withdrawal of funding or even lawsuits by incensed parents, the jury decided to withdraw Hochholczerová’s book from the competition, offering instead to send the book to the schools on request. While the resulting turmoil was great for sales, it has caused a rift in the literary community, put the talented young writer under a huge amount of stress, and aroused some fear that it has sounded the death knell of the René Prize.
After two years of Covid-related disruptions, the Authors’ Reading Month (ARM), Europe’s largest literary festival, organized by the Brno-based publishing house Větrné mlýny in partnership with Slovakia’s Literárny klub, returned this summer. It was hosted by venues in five cities of the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Lviv, which has hosted the festival in the past, was not on this year’s itinerary because of the war in Ukraine). With Icelandic literature as the focus of the twenty-third edition, some of the best-known Czech and Slovak writers were paired with thirty-one authors from Iceland, including Hallgrímur Helgason, Bragi Ólafsson, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson, as well as Sjón, who also attended the Slovak premiere of The Northman, the American epic action thriller based on Viking myths whose script he co-wrote with the director Robert Eggers.
A literary summer will be followed by an autumn packed with literary events, kicking off with a one-day conference at the Institute for Slovak Literature on 9 September during which leading academics explored the image of animals in Slovak poetry. The Žilina Literary Festival, which will be held from 22 to 25 September in the beautifully restored New Synagogue, will feature Swiss writer Joachim B. Schmidt, German author Judith Hermann, Czech writer Petra Soukupová, Katarzyna Surmiak-Domańska and Wojciech Dutka from Poland, and Martin M. Šimečka from Slovakia. From 5 to 8 October, Dutch-born and UK-based author Michel Faber, Austrian writer Marie Gamillscheg, and Ukrainian poet Olena Huseinova will appear in Bratislava and Modra, alongside a range of Slovak writers as part of the Novotvar festival.
Cristina Pérez Díaz, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Puerto Rico
If you come to Puerto Rico these days and book an Airbnb, you’d probably end up in Santurce. It’d strike you, perhaps, as the “Puerto Rican Brooklyn,” with its hip coffee shops, bougie restaurants and boutique stores—and even better, a beautiful Caribbean beach at walking distance. But, as with Brooklyn and every gentrified neighborhood with a trendy façade above a working class, colored, or industrial background, there’s a complicated story behind the scenes. During the 80s’ and 90s’, Santurce was, among other things, the center of the underground queer life in the city. There was nothing fancy, bougie, or trendy to it. Though there was, for sure, much glam of its own.
The gay Santurce of those years was, as the title of Luis Negrón’s brilliant collection of short stories puts it––not without a touch of melodrama––a “Cruel World.” The book was first published in Puerto Rico more than ten years ago (Mundo Cruel, La secta de los perros, 2010; second edition, Agentes Catalíticos, 2011), then released in translation (by Suzanne Jill Levine, Mundo Cruel, Seven Stories Press, 2013), and won the Lambda Literary Prize for Gay General Fiction in 2014. But books have a way of getting back at us, precisely at the point when the world they are talking about seems to have vanished. Late last June, each of the short stories of Mundo Cruel gained a new breath in the voice of a stage artist at Teatro Francisco Arriví, in Santurce. The occasion was a fundraiser for La Esquina, the new bookstore Negrón himself, with his partner Adrián, just opened this past week. Negrón has been a longtime bookseller in San Juan––an almost heroic, almost cruel profession in Puerto Rico. We local readers are full of expectation for this cozy new bookstore––not in Santurce this time––which we hope will be a space of encounter after the past two years of so much solitary reading.
That night at the theater, each performer presented a stage reading of a story on an almost bare stage with minimal props. I don’t remember having been so moved by art or literature in a long time. The stories are for the most part really funny . . . and then they punch you unaware. Their world is vaguely familiar to me, born in 1985 and never having lived or hanged out in the Santurce of those years. And though I was aware as a child of the AIDS crisis that was then taking place, the epidemic never touched me closely. So, I felt neither painful remembrance nor quite nostalgia. But literature doesn’t need to talk about something you can identify with in the flesh in order to move you, and move you strongly. My gaze is somehow foreign to the world of the book, but Negrón is an exceptional writer, and he takes me right into the thick of it, as if I myself had lived there. That is why, mixed with the laughter (there was a lot, joyfully resounding in the house), at some point during the evening I surprised myself crying. I don’t think I’d ever cried at the theater before—and I do love theater. What is it about these characters that felt so haunting today, even as their world disappears? Perhaps it is precisely that detachment from space they have acquired with time which allows them to alight anew, fresh with feelings, onto our changed affective landscapes.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Belgium
The most attractive and popular cultural event last week in Brussels was the thirteenth edition of the BD Comic Strip Festival, which capped off with the much awaited Atomium Awards in excess of €100,000. Given the strong comic strip tradition and the long-standing popularity of characters such as Tintin, soon to turn 100, and the Smurfs (Belgium’s second most famous export, after waffles), launched back in the 1950s, no wonder that the festival and the prizes attracted major national and international interest. This edition explicitly addressed such rich traditions, as it marked the seventieth anniversary of Franquin’s Marsupilami. The nine-section Atomium Awards included the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Prize won by Emilie Plateau for a graphic “epic” on the challenges of being a woman artist (expressed through her own persona, Emily D. Platew) in the male-dominated world of the western comic strip, and the Raymond Leblanc Prize for Young Artists, won by Cyril Legrais and Alice V.D.M. for a gay love-story across the generational divide. The career achievement award went to Judith Vanistendael, who has been active and widely praised in the industry—home and abroad—for over two decades. The Reportage Award went to the Turkish journalist Can Dündar and Egyptian artist Jbr Anwar for their book Le nouveau sultan (The New Sultan, a work supported by the newspaper Le Soir) about the life and ascent to power of Turkish President Erdogan. Belgian culture has made an international splash in the field of the criticism and theory of the comic, graphic, and (movie-)photo-novel through the work of poet and academic Jan Baetens. Therefore, it pays tremendous attention to such genres, as shown in the acclaim accorded Jean-Louis Trapp’s graphic novel Le petit frère (The Little Brother).
The connections between the literary and the visual have always run deep in Belgium. The coming week, an international colloquium marking ten years since the passing of major writer Henry Bauchau places his work precisely at the intersection of words and images. Co-organized by the Bauchau Collections at UCLouvain and the Museum of Book Art and Binding Wittockiana and presided over by major researchers and authors Myriam Watthee-Delmotte and Anne Reverseau, the event will feature academic presentations, art exhibition openings, book design contests, and award ceremonies (readers can attend the event virtually).
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