Prague Writers’ Festival underway

A dozen international authors, including US novelist Paul Auster, Pakistani Tariq Ali, Canadian Margaret Atwood and Czech Ivan Klíma are taking part in the 2008 Prague Writers' Festival which opened in the Czech capital on Sunday. In its eighteenth year, the festival spotlights the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 and what it represented: ideas, freedom of expression, revolt against of bureaucracy, and pent-up feelings of frustration. The writers' experiences will be shared in conferences, lectures and debates, the main theme of which is "Laughter and Forgetting," a reference to Czech author Milan Kundera's novel of the same name. The Prague Writers Festival ends on June 5th.