The first part of this session looks back on the residency programme in Japan in which four EUPL laureates participated in. This is followed by readings and discussions with EUPL authors from Ireland, Latvia, and Greece.

Part of European Literature Festival in Japan’s Free online programme. More information here

Part 1

In 2018, after participating in the European Literature Festival that year, four writers Lidija Djkosvka, Adam Foulds, Jasmin Frelih, and Walid Nabhan, all winners of the European Union Prize for Literature, participated in a week-long residency in Okinawa. The experience led to the production of a unique book "Okinawa Paradox" by photographs by Joan Tomás and texts from all four writers. Today, the organisers present the publication, looking back at the various experiences that went into its creation.

Stéphane Robert 

Coordinator and Artistic Director of the CRICAO association, and project manager of the European project Colab Quarter supported by the Creative Europe program.

Joan Tomas

Photographer

Daniel Lopez

Part 2

Three writers, winners of the European Union Prize for Literature, present and read from their works, and discuss their writing and views.

Jan Carson

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collection, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press), two micro-fiction collections, Postcard Stories and Postcard Stories 2 (Emma Press). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019. It won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland in 2019 and the Kitschies Prize for Speculative Fiction in 2020. It was shortlisted for the Dalkey Book Prize in 2020. The Last Resort, a ten part BBC Radio 4 short story series and accompanying short story collection is forthcoming from Doubleday in early 2021. In 2018 Jan was the inaugural Translink/Irish Rail Roaming Writer in Residence on the Trains of Ireland. She was the Open Book Scotland Writer in Lockdown 2020.

Jānis Joņevs

Jānis Joņevs (1980) is a prose writer. His first novel Jelgava ’94 (Doom ’94), published in 2013, immediately became a cult book among readers, and was chosen as one of 100 most favourite Latvian books of all time during the TV show Lielā lasīšana (The Great Reading). It was also praised among critics and received numerous awards, including the EU Prize for Literature in 2014. The novel is set in Jelgava city in 1994 and focuses on youngsters who are driven to heavy metal music. Sharing this taste of music and subculture, they explore the life through the eyes of their youth. It is a book of a whole generation who experienced their youth in the nineties, when Latvia had just regained independence. This novel has been adapted for a theatre performance by Jelgava New Theatre and as a film with the same title directed by Jānis Ābele. It has been translated into ten languages, and currently is being translated into Japanese.

Jānis Joņevs also writes short stories for children and adults. In 2014 the publishing house Liels un Mazs published his book for children Slepenie svētki (Secret Celebration). In 2020 Joņevs’ first collection of stories Tīģeris (Tiger) was published by Dienas Grāmata.

Nikos Chryssos 

Born in 1972 in Athens, Nikos Chryssos (Νίκος Χρυσός) studied at the Department of  Biology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and at the Department of Film Direction at the School of Cinematography ‘Lykourgos Stavrakos’. He is the owner of an old books’ store in Athens. He wrote the novels The Secret of the Last Page (Το μυστικό της τελευταίας σελίδας, Kastaniotis Editions 2009) and New Day (Καινούργια μέρα, Kastaniotis Editions 2018). In 2014 he edited the annotated revised edition of the book Unforgettable Times (Αξέχαστοι καιροί) by Lefteris Alexiou as well as the collected volume Stories of Books (Ιστορίες βιβλίων), both published by Kastaniotis Editions.  Since September 2018 he has been the Vice-President of the Greek Section of the ‘International Society of Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis’ (ISFNK).

In 2020, he received the “National Book Award for a work that promotes social awareness”.