The Meet the Author Month is an international literary festival. This year's edition is held between 5 July and 4 August.
The first edition in the series was hosted by Brno, Czech Republic, in 2000. Each edition offers two major programmes: one focussing on Czech, Slovak and Polish literature and the other devoted to the special honorary guest.
The authors are meeting their readers in several cities this year: in Košice, Ostrava and Wroclaw. They are also expected to visit Lviv.
Wroclaw's Mediateka offers daily meet-the-author sessions with writers from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine. They read excerpts from their books in the original while translation is is displayed on a separate screen. The organisers are keen to promote authors who are still to be discovered by Polish readers. Former editions celebrated honorary guests such as Scotland, Canada and Belarus.
The Wroclaw edition of the event features a number of leading Polish authors such as Ryszard Krynicki, Krzysztof Varga, Joanna Bator, Iza Michalewicz, Filip Springer, Anna Janko, Jacek Dehnel, Ziemowit Szczerek, Olga Tokarczuk, Małgorzata Szejnert, Magdalena Tulli and Jakub Żulczyk, as well as their Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian counterparts, the latter including Natalka Snyadanko, Andriy Bondar, Yuriy Andrukhovych, Oleksandr Irvanec, Serhiy Zhadan, Taras Prochasko, Yuriy Vynnychuk, Sofia Andrukhovych and Oksana Zabuzhko).
These daily meetings are carried out according to a tested formula: readers meet with a Polish, Czech or Slovak authors at 7 pm and their Ukrainian counterpart at 8.30 pm.
The festival was conceived by the Czech publishing house Vetrne mlyny, which is now working in collaboration with the Slovak Konznica pre mladez mesta Košice, the Municipal Library in Wrocla, the Institute of Slavic Philologies and the Ukrainian Publishers' Forum.
Meet the Author Month, 5 July - 4 August, Mediateka, Plac Teatralny 5.
