Years later, Prague will stop supporting the Writers’ Festival, which it says is elitist
Even the repeated participation of the Nobel Prize winners in literature, the sold-out screening of the film Hours commented on by the author of the artwork Michael Cunningham or the high reputation in the Prague Writers’ Festival are not enough to reach the grant.
Prague City Hall released on Monday, to whom it will contribute to the operation in the coming years, and the most famous Czech literary festival left empty-handed. The event, which would celebrate its 30th anniversary next year, previously receives millions of crowns from the capital. Later, the contribution was significantly reduced, but this year it created a million crowns.
One of the grant evaluators, Tomáš Kubíček. | Photo: ČTK
“The resonance of the festival in the media and in the public is not proportional to the amount of money spent,” wrote the jury, whose experts in the field of literature this year were Petr Bílek from Literární noviny and the director of the Moravian Regional Library Tomáš Kubíček.
They are bothered that in the request he had to send in June this year, the festival gave only a “vague” idea of who it would welcome in the fall of 2020. “It should innovate its form and expand better approaches more attention to the Prague public, “say the jurors.
While their colleagues, experts in the field of theater, such as the commercial Summer Shakespeare Festival with a budget of over 34 million crowns, will contribute at least a symbolic 100 thousand crowns, because “media promotion of the Summer Shakespeare Festival is also a significant promotion of the capital”. Prague in the name, the same argument does not apply.
The festival plans a budget of 6.9 million for next year, but it includes the costs of year-round activities of the organizing foundation, which continues to operate for example web Literární.cz.
Aktuálně.cz contacted one of the evaluators, Tomáš Kubíček, but he did not want to comment on the commission’s decision. “I have no legitimacy to answer because it is a collective decision that has been debated, voted on, and if I commented on it now, I oppose that principle,” he said.
“We respect the expertise of evaluators and members of the grant committee,” adds Hana Třeštíková, a councilor for culture in Prague, elected for the Prague movement herself.
Festival President Michael March. | Photo: Matej Slávik
In addition to the unsuccessful grant application in Prague in addition, the Writers’ Festival has to deal with another problem. After years when it was held in the Senate due to a lower contribution from Prague, he must also leave. “Unfortunately, regardless of the municipality, we have been told by the Senate that they no longer count on us for next year,” confirms the festival’s president, the American poet Michael March, who lives in Prague.
He does not understand the decision of the Prague Grant Commission. “Before the thirtieth anniversary of Thirty Years to Prague, we have the world’s writers’ car as the ideas that spread according to their present. year of the event strongly endangered.
It resonates little
The Writers’ Festival, which March runs with its wife Vlasta Brtníková Marchová, has been operating since the early 1990s. During that time, he brought dozens of renowned foreign authors to the metropolis, including Salman Rushdie, Don DeLill, Harold Pinter and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
His guests were 11 Nobel Prize winners in literature, including Günter Grass, Orhan Pamuk and Světlana Alexijevičová. The organizers invited her a year before she received the award, and the Czech audience did not know it yet. Today, her work is completely translated, recently her work was a theatrical production and the author last spoke at the National Theater.
In recent years, the festival has welcomed Chuck Palahniuk, Irvin Welsh or this year’s two Pulitzer Prize winners, Junot Diaz and Michael Cunningham. The author of the bestseller novel Hours in Prague at the world premiere reads from his new prose and showed several debates, autograph signings and meetings with readers. The festival sold out his commented screening of the film Hours at the Světozor cinema for several hundred people within tens of minutes.
The Writers’ Festival has been held in the Senate for several years, and has moved there due to lower grants from the city. He used to rent, for example, the New Stage. | Photo: PWF / Tereza Kunderová
The jurors at the Prague City Hall nevertheless stated that the festival does not resonate sufficiently in the media.
However, a look at Newton’s media archive shows that all local dailies reported on the event this year, the festival was completely broadcast by Czech Television, you can send interviews to television, radio and magazines and the festival’s responses continued to the student magazine of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University or thanks to the so-called book influencers.
Only the Book World sales fair in the Czech Republic has more consistent, but spreads comparable media coverage.
First attempt to cancel support
However, this is not the first time that Prague has reproached itself against its most famous literary festival. Already in 2013, he received a 3-year grant from the then, 5 million crowns to 300,000, at the time explaining that “publishers are negative about it.”
The festival does not really develop closer cooperation with publishers, nor has it ever sought to do so. While the Spring World book program to some extent determines which books the local publishers publish and which authors need to promote the Festival, the autumn writers do not take the market into account. It invites guests according to who fits into the concept and can comment on a pre-selected topic. This year we have known “Beauty saves the world”.
One of the guests of the festival this year was Junot Díaz. | Photo: PWF / Tereza Kunderová
The festival also regularly introduces local authors to the world context – this year the Czech representatives were David Zábranský and Jan Němec, who both recently published significant novels. At least Němec’s court can, according to the responses, strive for the Magnesia Litera award next year.
Above all, the Writers’ Festival has long enjoyed a high reputation abroad, where for some authors it is even the only living link with Czech literature. “I haven’t really heard of any Czech writer except Milan Kundera for a long time. But is there still a Prague Writers’ Festival?” Last year, in an interview with the author of this text, Salman Rushdie answered the question of what he associates the Czech Republic with in world literature today.
Similarly, in an interview with the journal Aktuálně.cz a few years ago, Nobel Prize winner for literature Han Pamuk or novelist Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the later filmed bestseller Klub rváčů, received the award. “At the word Prague, I will first recall my visit in the 1980s and, of course, the Prague Writers’ Festival,” said EL Doctorow, a now-classic classic of modern literature, who hosted one of his last readings at the American Prague Festival in Pittsburgh.
In other respects, the Writers’ Festival also acts as a link between Prague and abroad. For example, when the Czech ambassador to France Petr Drulák granted Czech citizenship to Milan Kunder at the end of last month, he wrote in the accompanying text for the daily Právo that he managed to connect with the Kunder family thanks to Michael March from the Writers’ Festival.
Michael Cunningham at this year’s Writers’ Festival. | Photo: PWF / Tereza Kunderová
The Commission and its valuable
Tomáš Kubíček, the director of the Moravian Regional Library in Brno, and Petr Bílek, former editor-in-chief of the weekly Reflex and now head of Literární noviny for the ninth year in a row, decided on literature grants at the Prague City Hall.
While the Writers’ Festival left empty-handed, Bílek’s Literární noviny received a grant from Prague – a few months ago in the form of a so-called individual special-purpose subsidy. sent 110 thousand crowns to a special supplement dedicated to the Velvet Revolution.
When deciding on grants, Kubíček and Bílek had ten external evaluators on hand, among whom literary scholars predominated. However, some were also judged by the translator Erik Lukavský, who runs the Fra publishing house and the café of the same name. She received 500,000 crowns from the same jury for the year-round program of her sought-after author readings, 280,000 more than this year. “The project could boldly compete with literary evenings in any European metropolis,” the jurors praised the Fra program.
When asked if there was a conflict of interest, Lukavský did not consider the application of his own publishing house. “It works transparently at the municipality, they evaluated everyone in the projects, and if they have a conflict of interest, they have to reject them. So it can’t happen that I vote for Fradělí,” he answered a question in Aktuálně.cz.
another of the jurors was the literary scholar Michal Kosák, who, in addition to the Institute for Czech Literature, works as an editor at the Triáda publishing house. This was successful for the jurors with all three one-year grant applications plus a request for multi-year support in the total amount of 507 thousand crowns. The Triad will publish for them the work of the Wels brothers or other volumes of the writings of Jiří Němec and Jiří Weila, who were closely connected with Prague.
Kosák explains to the question Aktuálně.cz that each application has three evaluators, and so only some of them were assigned to it, however, among them we also support the publication of Jiří’s files. “I asked the relevant official if I did not have a conflict of interest when I cooperated with the Triáda publishing house,” Kosák explains.
He does not have a permanent employment relationship or an employment agreement with the publishing house, he only works on some titles and Weil’s writings are not among them. “The clerk told me that I should state this fact in the evaluation, which I did,” adds Michal Kosák, who stated in his evaluation that Triáda is “a small, well-established publishing house that can prepare demanding companies”, and concluded addition that he has collaborated with the company on other projects and is not employed by it.
Unlike the Triad, on the other hand, the Argo publishing house failed to apply for a multi-year grant. He has received at least a million crowns from the city in recent years and will receive this report next year. WITH grant applications in 2021 and 2022 but now it didn’t work. “The edition of new translations of the works of world historians belongs entirely to the tasks that the Ministry of Culture is to fulfill, especially,” the jury argues.
On the other hand, Revolver Revue magazine, the Prague Microfestival, the Scandinavian House, the Prague Literary House of German Language Authors, the Institute for the Study of Literature and the organizers of the Magnesia Litera and Muriel awards have become successful applicants for literary grants in Prague.
The Writers ‘Association, which wants to repeat the first modern Writers’ Congress in Prague after five years, failed and asked for a contribution of 200,000 crowns. According to the evaluators, however, the congress is “intended primarily for a closed description of the circle of authors or a very specific audience of interest, and this needs the goal of the target group that the project supports, the form of which appears to be purposeful,” the jurors noted.
The distribution of grants in culture for next year has already been approved by the Committee for Culture, Exhibitions, Tourism and Foreign Relations of the Prague City Council, according to the management schedule it has yet to be approved by deputies and councilors by 31 January 2020.