Nyheter

8/6 Internationellt författarsamtal: LAIMONAS BRIEDIS

Den litauiske författaren Laimonas Briedis samtalar om sin bok Vilnius: City of Strangers tillsammans med Olav Fumarola Unsgaard, programansvarig Göteborgs Litteraturhus och författare till göteborgsskildringen Lilla Valparaiso.

Samtalet kommer handla om staden Vilnius som en korsväg mellan det judiska, litauiska, polska och belarusiska Europa.

Boken kommer finnas till försäljning.

Lördag 8 juni
Dörrarna öppnar 18.00, samtalet börjar 18.30.

Förfriskningar utlovas!

Fri entré, ingen föranmälan. Samtalet sker på engelska.

 

Programpunkten är ett samarbete mellan Judiska salongen, Göteborgs Litteraturhus och Litauens Kulturattaché i Sverige, Finland och Danmark, samt genomförs med stöd från Litauens Kulturinstitut i Vilnius.

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In english

No entrance fee

The conversation will be conducted in english. Questions can be asked in English, Swedish and Lithuanian.

Doors open 18.00, the talk will begin at 18.30

Snacks and refreshments will be served. The book Vilnius: City of Strangers will be available for purchase.

About Vilnius: City of Strangers and the author Laimonas Briedis

Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a UNESCO City of Literature, known for its multilingual writing tradition and printing culture. Founded in 1323, Vilnius is also a place where familiar aspects of European history and literature take an uncommon turn, giving the city a unique voice of its own. Marked by linguistic pluralism, cultural variations, territorial changes and human losses, the city nonetheless emerges as a vast memory palace of Jewish, Lithuanian, Polish and Belorussian life. Writing of Vilnius, then, is always finding your way into the soulscape of the other.

Vilnius: City of Strangers is a story of the city placed within unexplored and imaginary maps of Europe. Reviewed by The Economist as being a ‘subtle and evocative book,’ where ‘vanished civilizations and lost empires leave a city stalked by horror and steeped in wonder,’ it has been translated into several languages, including Lithuanian, German, Chinese, Russian and Portuguese (Brazil). With each rendition, the book acquires a new chapter on the history of Vilnius as every translation takes the narrative of the place into a diffferent memory direction.

Laimonas Briedis is a writer and scholar of history, literature and the geographical imagination of Lithuania. A native of Vilnius, he has lived for most of his adult life in Vancouver (Canada) where he completed a doctoral degree in cultural geography at the University of British Columbia. He is also the author of Poetic Cartography: Bobrowski, Miłosz, Sutzkever, which explores the experience and narrative of wartime Vilnius from the biographical perspective of the three – German, Polish and Yiddish – poets. He is currently working on the book about Vilnius as a map of global narrative connections, while at the same time representing Vilnius as the official international cultural ambassador of the city during it’s seven hundred years anniversary.

Laimonas has made appearances in numerous literary events, including the Jerusalem, London, Warsaw, Vilnius, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Gothenburg book fairs, Worlds Literary Symposium in Norwich, EU-China Literary Festival, and has served on the International Competition Jury of the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival.

For more on Vilnius: City of Strangers: https://vilniuscityofstrangers.com

 

This event is presented with the support of the Lithuanian Cultural Attaché in Sweden, Finland and Denmark, supported by the Lithuanian Culture Institute.