The Prague Writers’ Festival, Czech Republic
June 6 – 10
This year, the Prague Writers’ Festival—celebrating its 20th anniversary—takes on the theme of “Heresy and Rebellion”—a fitting subject for the annual event that emerged after the fall of Communism and, as director Michael March says, “breathed on Kafka’s door and blew it open.” In June, the City of a Hundred Spires will welcome three glorious rebels, each a former winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, to the nová scéna of the National Theatre: Chinese novelist Gao Xingjian, author of the lyrical Soul Mountain; Romanian-born Herta Müller, who moved to Berlin shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott, known for his probing works on colonial rule in the West Indies. Here’s to the rebels.