Annual Authors’ Reading Month focuses on voices from exile
Throughout July, the Moravian capital of Brno is hosting the Authors’ Reading Month literary festival. Alongside local writers, this year’s focus is on authors living in exile, who can no longer publish in their home countries. Ruth Fraňková spoke with Pavel Drábek, curator of the festival’s exile section, to find out more.
In previous years, the festival always featured a guest country. This year, you’re focusing on literature in exile. Why is that?
“Literature in exile, in a way, is also a country, but a negation of a country. These are 31 authors from 26 countries who have lost their homelands and were forced into exile. In a way, there is no country that will say, you are ours, we will support you. And we have realized this over the past 25 years, that the national perspective is always, to some extent, limiting.
“Because it creates an idea of a national contained culture, while being a writer, as one of our guests said, is you have to become an inner exile to write for an audience, for a reader elsewhere. So being a writer is already, in essence, being an exile to your lived experience.”
Can you introduce us at least to some of the authors taking part this year and tell us a bit about their work?
“There are 31 authors, and every author is a universe in their own right. It is very difficult to sum them up, as there is no single point that connects them. In fact, we don’t even ask our guest authors to speak about exile — the connection to exile is purely a curatorial perspective.
“Among the many participants, we have authors exiled from China, like Geling Yan. She is a scriptwriter, novelist, and short story writer, who used to be a dancer in the People's Army during the Cultural Revolution. At 22, after retiring as a dancer, she began writing. Her work quickly became a thorn in the side of the regime, prompting her exile.
“She later worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter and contributed to several films. She now lives between Hollywood and Berlin and is a remarkable personality. As she herself says, ‘To write the truth means to be an exile. Then let’s be so.’
“Another guest is Mohamedou Ould Slahi Houbeini, a Mauritanian engineer who said, ‘I never trained to be a writer. I never wanted to be a writer. But writing happened to me when I was kidnapped by the CIA, interrogated in Jordan, and then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, where I spent 14 years without trial.’
“After his release, still with no proof of guilt, he wrote his life story, which was published as Guantánamo Diary and adapted into the film The Mauritanian.
“We also have Hamid Ismailov, an Uzbek-Russian author who was exiled from Uzbekistan and later worked for the BBC World Service for 25 years. He currently lives between London and Prague and is a well-known novelist and poet. And the list continues, covering 26 countries and four continents.”
Despite coming from different regions and backgrounds, do these exiled writers have something in common? Do they explore common themes in their work?
“This is a very interesting question, and it’s difficult to answer simply. In some ways, it might even be disrespectful to search for connections in what are often traumatic, profoundly tragic, and humiliating life stories — it risks comparing suffering, which is never appropriate.
“However, one theme we can interpret, rather than define, is the rediscovery of humanity. What does it mean to be a human who has been dislocated, thrown into homelessness, and then had to re-establish themselves, first as a human being, and then as a writer?
“And while we are a literary festival and naturally focused on their writing, for many of these individuals, exile was not just a background detail — it was a decisive, transformative moment in their lives.”
Finally, Authors' Reading Month was established in 2000 in Brno as a local event. How has it changed over the past quarter of a century?
“The publishing house Větrné Mlýny, translated as Windmills, started this Quixotic journey in Brno in 2000. What began as a small, idealistic endeavour has grown into what is probably the largest literary festival in Central Europe.
“Now, all participating authors travel from Brno to Ostrava, and then continue to Slovakia — reading in Trenčín, Prešov, and Bratislava. Czech and Slovak authors also make their way to Lviv, Ukraine, for five days.
“So, over the past 20 years, this has become far more than a Brno event — it has grown into a truly international festival.”
