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Blog entries on '05 July 2006'
Wednesday 05 July 2006
Arvon on
The Arvon International Poetry Competition 2006 is now open. The competition has been running for twenty-five years and first opened in 1980 with Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin amongst the judges. There is no restriction on line length or subject -- all poems are welcome. The deadline is September 15th 2006. Entries cost £7 for the first poem and £5 for each poem thereafter. Prize money ranges from £500 to £5000. I'm always rather wary about competitions that you have to pay to enter, but the money raised, I'm told, goes towards Arvon's grants for writers programme.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: poetry
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Wednesday 05 July 2006
Hermann Ungar
Put the name of the Czech writer Hermann Unger (rendered Ungar by his UK publishers Dedalus) into Google and the second entry you get is for the The Hermann Unger Literary Teahouse (Literární Cajovna Hermanna Ungera)! How fine is that!?
Winningly, the Teahouse gives a nice gloss on Unger's life:
The teahouse is named after a native of Boskovice whose writing was sometimes compared to that of Kafka. Hermann Unger was born in Boskovice in 1893 and grew up speaking German and Czech. While at school in Brno he became active in Jewish politics, and went on to study Hebrew, Arabic and law at university. The studies were interrupted by war and Hermann was dispatched to the Russian front from where he eventually returned wounded and with a silver medal for valour. His writing career began in 1920 with Boys and Murderers, and continued with The Maimed (1922) and The Class (1927). Unger became friends with some of Prague’s most famous Jewish-German writers: Paul Kornfeld, Ernst Weiss, and Franz Werfel, and was a contemporary of Franz Kafka and Max Brod.
He died of acute appendicitis at the age of 36 in December 1929, but has not been forgotten by the tea-connoisseurs of his hometown.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors
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Wednesday 05 July 2006
Zurau Aphorisms
Not due out in the UK until this coming November, but certainly worth noting, is Franz Kafka's The Zurau Aphorisms (Harvill Secker). (the publisher information I have renders this "Zureau"; a dear friend tells me "Zürau" is best.) The only information I have, so far, comes straight from Amazon:
Franz Kafka spent eight months in Zurau between September 1917 and April 1918, enduring at his sister's house the onset of tuberculosis. Illness paradoxically set him free to write, in a series of philosophical fragments, his settling of accounts with life, marriage, his family, guilt and man's condition. These "aphorisms" will appear, sometimes with a few words changed, scattered across other writings (letters, diaries), some of which appeared as posthumous fragments only after his death in 1924. By chance, Roberto Calasso rediscovered the original notebooks as Kafka wrote them, in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Each thought or sequence of thoughts is set off on a separate page in counterpoint to the white space surrounding them. With a brief introduction and afterword by Calasso, the assemblage is a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. It is a lost jewel that provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news
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