The Creative Genius of the Lands Between: East Central Europe and the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1905-2020 is an exhibit on display on the Allen Library North 1st-floor balcony now through February 29, 2020. The exhibit is accompanied by a concise 4-minute, subtitled video presentation by 2018 Nobel laureate in literature Olga Tokarczuk from Poland, in which she shares her thoughts on what it means to be a Polish and a Central European writer today. Since 1905 a total of fifteen East Central European writers have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – brief profiles of each of the fifteen are featured. The introduction to the exhibit acknowledges the problematic nature of honoring a single writer each year, and cites 2019 Nobel laureate from Austria Peter Handke’s provocative comment in a recent interview, “What about the literature of the Slovenian minority in Austrian Carinthia? There’s a fantastic writer there named Florjan Lipuš who writes in Slovene ... and has he ever been considered for the Nobel Prize? When have these smaller literatures ever been recognized?” Copies of a one-page handout providing a list of 140 outstanding modern and contemporary writers from throughout East Central Europe recommended by UW faculty, whose work has been translated into English and is available in the UW Libraries’ collections are available to visitors. |