Your weekly shot of global literary news is here! Today we travel to Austria, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Morocco to find out about the latest prizes, performances and literary festivals.
Contributor Flora Brandl reporting from Austria:
In the southern state of Styria, the oldest Austrian festival for contemporary art, Steirischer Herbst (Styrian Autumn), recently opened with a powerful speech by the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas. Styrian-born, Haas is one of the most renowned figures of the international New Music scene and currently teaches at Columbia University.
In his opening speech, Haas reflected on the dynamics of the remnants of Nazism and the burgeoning avant-garde art scene in Styria. While Nazism was always at the forefront of fighting so-called “degenerate art”—“for they knew: art is dangerous for them”—it also provided fertile grounds for a creative form of resistance: “We [artists] were spurred by the pain and the rage and the grief,” Haas recounted. He ended with an invocation that the role of artists today is to “spread the virus of humanitarianism” in the wake of a worldwide rise of fundamentalism. A political speech with a very personal note, the entire speech can be read in the original German here.
Fittingly, a symposium entitled Hoffnung als Provokation (Hope as Provocation) will explore the resistive potential of hope in response to nationalism and authoritarian political systems—how can hope go beyond its connotations of passivity? One of the invited guest speakers is Aslı Erdoğan, a female Turkish writer who was recently imprisoned for her connections to a Kurdish newspaper. The city of Graz has granted her permanent asylum, and the festival organisers hope she will be permitted to leave Turkey and attend the symposium on September 28.
Ending with another Styrian-born contemporary Austrian artist, experimental documentary filmmaker Michael Glawogger once described the task of a filmmaker as to “drift with no direction except one’s own curiosity and intuition.” In 2014, during a shooting in Liberia for his documentary Untitled, Glawogger tragically died of malaria. The film, which was completed by his long-term collaborator Monika Willi, will be shown at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11 and 13.
Editor-at-Large for Guatemala, José García, on events in Central America:
Recently the committee of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature announced its latest recipient: the writer, literary critic, and journalist Francisco Alejandro Méndez. Author of over ten books, Francisco joins Mario Monteforte Toledo, Augusto Monterroso, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and many others who have received Guatemala’s most prestigious literary recognition. Francisco will receive the award on October 19, the birth anniversary of Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias. The ceremony will also serve as part of the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Asturias’ Nobel Prize win.
Last week Guatemala’s National Symphonic dedicated a show to Miguel Ángel with music written by Joaquín Orellana, Igor de Gandarias, and Sergio Reyes Mendoza, and visual interventions by the photographer and visual artist Daniel Hernández Salazar. Among Asturia’s most famous works are El Señor Presidente, and Men of Maize. Miguel Angel Asturias was the second Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and remains the only Central American to do so.
Additionally, F&G Editores recently released Valeria Cerezo’s debut novel La Flor Oscura, which was shortlisted for this year’s BAM Letras Novel National Prize. Cerezo’s story The Cage, translated into English by David Unger, was recently featured on Asymptote Translation Tuesday. The Cage is part of Valeria’s short story collection La muerte de Darling that also got shortlisted for the 2016 edition of the BAM Letras National Prize, in the short story category.
Finally, in Costa Rica, Uruk Editores released Neblina Púrpura, the latest novel of the Aquileo J. Echeverría National Short Story Prize winner, Vernor Muñoz. Neblina Púrpura revolves around the golden era of rock music in Costa Rica.
Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco:
In September 2014, Morocco and Algeria celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the closing of the 1,600 kilometer-long land border by building twin walls; in September 2017, the inaugural Maghrebi Book Fair, Lettres du Maghreb, took place in Oujda, a city of about half a million some fifteen kilometers west of the walls. 200-odd intellectuals, for the most part from the Greater Maghreb, but also representing Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, gathered for four days of roundtable discussions, readings, and workshops, united by co-organizer Abdelkader Retnani’s rallying cry: “For us, the future is Maghrebi!” Here’s hoping that the festival’s symbolic opening of borders translates into a real rapprochement.
Morocco’s rentrée littéraire, the new publishing season, has been in full swing, with a regional book fair in Sidi Kacem featuring a strong showing of local publishing houses and writers from September 19 to 24, and the promise of a 40-author-strong literary extravaganza organized by Nadia Essalmi at Salé’s Quai des créateurs on October 7.
Meanwhile, we’re all on tenterhooks awaiting the November announcement of the 2017 laureate of the prestigious Prix Renaudot—two Moroccan authors are in the running: Mahi Binebine for his novel Le Fou du Roi (The King’s Jester), and Leïla Slimani for her essay collection Sexe et mensonges: La vie sexuelle au Maroc (Sex and Lies: Sex Lives in Morocco).
*****
Read more dispatches: