with Sylvia Sasse, Iryna Herasimovich and Zmicier Vishniou
The project
33 Books for Another Belarus provides the opportunity to release books that can no longer be published in Belarus. To achieve this, the project establishes partnerships between independent publishers from Belarus and other European countries, and thus becomes an offer to think about free spaces for culture other than along national borders.
The initiators of 33 Books,
Sylvia Sasse and
Iryna Herasimovich, will present the project, its concept, history, and future plans. Together with the Belarusian publisher and poet
Zmicier Vishniou, they will also give an insight into the first two books that have been published as part of the project. A nearly 600-page anthology comprises poetry, theatre texts and performance documentaries by two literary associations that have played a key role in the emancipation of Belarusian literature from the Soviet tradition: the Bum-Bam-Lit movement and the Society of Free Authors. The anthology was created as a co-operation project between the Swiss publishing house diaphanes and the Belarusian publishing house Halijafy, which no longer exists. The second book,
The Dictionary of War by Ostap Slyvynsky, is a collection of stories which the Ukrainian poet heard from people on the run. The Belarusian translation by Iryna Herasimovich is published as a co-operation project between
Halijafy and
edition.fotoTAPETA.
Future publications will also be addressed at the event: Zmicier Vishniou, for example, will be offering a sample of his poems from the volume
unverordnungsverweigerung (German translation by Nina Weller).
Guests
© Nikita Fedosik
Iryna Herasimovich was born in Minsk in 1978 and has been a freelance translator since 2009. She has translated works by Lukas Bärfuss, Georg Büchner, Monika Rinck, Nora Gomringer, Mehdi Moradpour, Jonas Lüscher, Michael Köhlmeier, Franz Hohler and other German-language authors into Belarusian. She also works as a curator in the field of visual arts and is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry. Since 2021, she has been a PhD student at the Slavic Department of the University of Zurich in the SNF project
Arts & Disinformation.
© Universität Zürich
Sylvia Sasse is Professor of Slavic Literary Studies at the University of Zurich, co-founder and member of the Centre for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK). She is the editor of
novinki and
Geschichte der Gegenwart. Her most recent publications include Sylvia Sasse,
Verkehrungen ins Gegenteil. Über Subversion als Machttechnik, Matthes & Seitz 2023.
© Maximilian Gödecke
The Belarusian prose writer, poet, and artist
Zmicier Vishniou is an important literary voice in Belarus. He was a co-founder of the literary movement
Bum-Bam-Lit, which was one of the most significant phenomena in the Belarusian literature of the 1990s. He is the author of nine books in Belarusian, including the most recent anti-novel If You Look Closer – Mars is Blue (2018). In 2007-2022, Zmicier Vishniou was the head of
Halijafy – one of the Belarusian leading independent publishing houses. Poems in various anthologies, essays, and his novel
Das Brennesselhaus (luxbooks, 2014) have been puplished in German so far. Since July 2022, Zmicier Vishniou has been a fellow in the
Writers-in-Exile programme of the German PEN.
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