guests from abroad

American writer. He was born in Jordan, but his parents are Lebanese. During his youth he travelled a lot, moving from country to country. As a teenager, he left to England, then to America, where he studied at UCLA in California. He is an educated engineer, but started writing very early. Aside from the story published in Polish The Hakawati, he published two stories in the USA – Koolaids and I, the Divine – as well as a collection of stories “The Perv”.

Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essay writer, translator and musician. He was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, studied (printing and literature) in Lvov and Moscow. He debuted in 1985 as a poet. That same year he founded (with Wiktor Neborak and Ołeksandr Irwanec) the group Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Side-show-Buffoonery), which influenced the Ukrainian literary scene significantly.

English writer of Polish descent, university lecturer, film producer, Vice-President of the British PEN Club. She was born in 1946 in Łódź and grew up in Paris and Montreal. The complicated story of Appignanesi’s family, which survived the occupation in Poland during World War II and later emigrated to Canada, is told in her book Losing The Dead: A Family Memoir (nomination for the Charles Taylor Award for the best novel in the non-fiction category).

Lecturer at the University of Illinois in Chicago, literature researcher, specialises in the 20th-century and present-day literature (particularly the issues of literary modernism and the literary output of Gertrude Stein); she is also a poet herself and has published six collections of poems until now.

German essayist, literary critic, writer. After the graduation examination in Weikersheim, he took up studies in the field of German philology in Freiburg. From 1985 till 2002 he was a publicist and a literary editor in a number of dailies: Stuttgarter Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau and Tagesspiegel. He is the author of books about the literary output of Paul Celan: Orte Paul Celans (1996), Celan am Meer (2004) and studies on contemporary German literature: Nach den Utopien. Eine Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. In 1996 he received the Ernst Robert Curtis award for his essays.

Hindu writer, feminist, polyglot and historian, who publishes her texts in prestigious British magazines. She is a very active member of Indian women's movements and is engaged in the defence of civil rights. For many years she worked as an editor at Oxford University Press and Zed Press Books. In 1984 she created the first feminist publishing house in India.

Slovenian poet, essayist, translator (of works including those of John Ashbery), and cultural critic; at present he belongs to the most highly regarded Slovenian authors, alongside Drag Jančar i Tomaž Salamun. He was born in Ljubljana. There, as a student of philosophy and foreign literature, he edited the monthly Literatura, the periodical of his generation. He did his post-graduate work at Syracuse University in New York, where he received his doctorate.

Popular and internationally recognised Indian writer, publicist and publisher. She married Rajiv Gokhale at a very young age. After the wedding she moved to Bombay, where she worked as a journalist. Her first book Paro: Dreams of Passion was released in 1984 and caused much agitation in India because of the brave treatment of the topic of sexuality. The tragic death of her husband put a stamp on her subsequent books.

German poet, prose author, essayist and translator; renowned representative of the “middle generation” of German authors. At the beginning of the 1990s he travelled a great deal – first to Moscow, where in order to support himself, he taught German for a year and a half; then later he went to Paris and Japan, and for three and a half years he lived in the United States. He is the author of two books of poetry, Loops (2001) and Pools (2006) and the novel Der kurze Traum des Jakob Voss (The Short Dream of Jakob Voss).

German director, writer and literary critic. He is the creator of film portraits of such figures as Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, Robert Walser, Peter Handke and Hans Werner Henze. He was an editor at a Bavarian radio station and participant in the programme The Literary Club on Swiss television.

French reporter, war correspondent, and author. He was a correspondent for the periodical Liberation for many years. He described the Solidarity uprising in Poland, and the fall of the Berlin wall and the Ceauescu regime. He spent three years in the former Yugoslavia, and was wounded in a firefight in Sarajevo. In 1994 he went to Rwanda. He has published three books dedicated to the civil war in Rwanda.

Hungarian writer, creator of film scenarios, one of the most important contemporary Hungarian writers, and laureate of the prestigious Kossuth Prize. Two of his novels have appeared in the Polish language: Satan’s Tango (1985, 2004) and Melancholy of Resistance (1989, 2007) and soon will be War and War, which is in the process of preparation now. The two first novels depict Hungary in the declining years of Goulash Communism, and War and War concerns a man searching and longing for harmony and peace in a world without time. Satan’s Tango and Melancholy of Resistance were both particularly popular in German-speaking countries.

French director, reporter, and documentary filmmaker. As a teenager, he was in the French resistance movement (he fought in Auvergne), and later he protested against the war in Algeria. He is a graduate of the Sorbonne and a lecturer in French literature and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. He was also the first French journalist to travel illegally through the communist German Democratic Republic. The product of his travels was a series of reportages published in Le Monde.

Swedish independent journalist, holds a doctorate in the history of literature from Stockholm University, he is an author of many essays, aphorism and reportages from Africa, South America, and Australia; he is best known to Polish readers as the author of the books Terra nullius and the widely acclaimed Exterminate All the Brutes, a work which engages in dialogue with the author of The Heart of Darkness in the very title.

Italian writer, poet, novelist, children’s book author, and dramatist. She was born in Fiesole, near Florence. She is the daughter of the painter Topazia Alliata di Salaparuta and Fosco Maraini, ethnologist and writer, known for his books about Tibet and Japan. After a childhood spent in Japan and the experience of time spent in a concentration camp there, about which she writes in her collection Mangiami pure (Devour Me Too, 1978) and the novel La nave per Kobe (The Boat to Kobe, 2001), she returned to Rome, where she began her life as a writer.

American literary researcher, and political philosopher. He has lectured at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (1974-1977, 1987-2001) and at the University of California at Berkeley (1977-1987). Since 2001 he has worked at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He was the author of the talked-about article Against Theory, which was published in 1982 on the pages of Critical Inquiry (written with Steven Knapp).

She debuted in 1982 with the novel Nadirs. The first version was published in partial form, as censorship did not permit to print certain fragments. In 1987, together with her husband at the time (writer Richard Wagner), she emigrated to Germany, where she lives until today. She lectured at German universities and occupied herself with writing. In the year 2009 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Amos Oz was our guest in Krakow on 20 October, at the invitation of his own main Polish publisher: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, which in recent years has published Oz’s newest book Scenes From a Village Life, and on the occasion of the writer’s visit, will be preparing for publication his short stories Where the Jackals Howl.

Partner in the visit of Amos Oz to Krakow are the Krakow Festival Office and the Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation – the organisers of the Second Joseph Conrad International Literature Festival.

Iranian-French comic and author of graphic novels, and director of animated films and writer of children’s books. She was raised in Teheran, where she attended a French Lyceum. A few years after the Iranian Revolution, which overthrown the Shah and handed over power to the Ayatollahs, Marjane’s parents sent her to Vienna to complete middle school. On her return to Teheran she studied Visual Communications at the Islamic University. In 1994 she travelled to Strasbourg to study at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Indian writer and literary critic, president of the Indian Academy of Art, translator of Polish literature. Author of 13 poetry books, literary criticism texts (in this 4 in English). His texts were printed, among others, in tome 11 Cracow Indological Studies – a periodical issued from 1995 by the Department of Indological Studies of the Institute of Oriental Philology of the Jagiellonian University.

Swedish journalist of Polish origins, opinion writer, and translator (of the works of Zbigniew Herbert). After his graduation exam, together with his mother, grandmother and brothers, he emigrated to Sweden. He delivered parcels, was an orderly in a hospital, crane operator, and in this way learned the Swedish way of life and language. At university in Stockholm, he studied film history and the history of ideas. He began work as a journalist in 1981, writing reportages on the subject of the Solidarity movement.

Ukrainian author, poet, opinion writer, and director, recognised as one of the Ukraine’s most influential young writers. He studied the Ukrainian and German languages at the University of Kharkiv, where he defended his doctoral thesis and now teaches about literature. In 2009 his book, entitled Відсоток самогубств серед клоунів (The Percentage of Suicides Among Clowns), made its way to the hands of Polish readers, with photographs by Jacek Dziaczkowski (pub. edition.fotoTAPETA).