In the accompanying programme of Book World Prague, Friday evening was dedicated to a literary debate with two outstanding European authors - the Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes and Slovenian playwright, novelist and author of essays Drago Jančar. The debate, with its deliberately noir title "Writing the Shaking of the World", was held in...

"This is a country with the smallest number of my translations. As far as I know, only two of my books have been published here. This is ideal, because nobody knows me here. It's quite the contrary of what you might think - it's a truly great and relaxed feeling, " one of Portugal's foremost contemporary writers, the seventy-six...

Such could be the summary of a debate started late on Friday afternoon by the moderator Petr Blažek. Addressing one of the book fair's focal themes, the 20th century, overlapping in this case well into the present, his guests included Alexandr Vondra, Michael Žantovský, director of the Polish Institute and political scientist Maciej Ruczaj, and the...

On Friday afternoon, the Lapidarium hosted a meeting with the American filmmaker Gene Deitch, who connected his life not only with animated film but also with Czechoslovakia, where he found both love and a suitable working environment.

Czech readers are very familiar with the author and translator Patrik Ouředník and it came as no surprise that during his visit to the Prague Book World the Lapidarium welcomed a capacity crowd. And there was much in store for the eager audience.

"When you talk about Israel, we are neither the West, nor the East. We are people from the Mediterranean. That's our identity," says Abraham B. Yehoshua, one of contemporary Israeli literature's most prominent authors, laureate of numerous awards and writer regularly nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The State of Israel, this year's Book World guest of honour, and the book fair's main topic, which is The Groundbreaking 20th Century, have a lot in common thematically. All the important geopolitical events of the past century had a huge and highly specific impact on this land, whose size hardly exceeding that of Moravia. And, on the other side,...

During the Book World Prague book fair, the majestic environment of the Lapidarium was transformed into a prestigious stage for holding various literary debates. As the Friday afternoon drew to a close, the venue hosted several Czech writers who write their works either exclusively or occasionally in a language other than Czech. A large audience...

The writer Artem Chekh has little more in common with our country than his name. He was born and lives in the Ukraine and has only visited the Czech Republic to present his new collection of essays Zero Point.

During a debate entitled Stars of Bohemian Studies, held as part of the Professional Forum, translators Tatjana Jamnik, Eero Balk and this year's Jiří Theiner Award winner David Short all agreed that numbers of students enlisting for Bohemian studies are steadily declining.