On September the first, scholarship stays within the scope of another edition of international project “Visegrad Literary Residences 2016” started in Budapest, Bratislava, Kraków and Prague. Four writers came to Kraków to spend three months here and pursue their projects, participate in meetings and literary events. This year, Villa Decius will host András Imreh, Patrik Oriešek, Żanna Słoniowska, Sára Vybíralová.
András Imreh (1966) – poet, translator, lecturer, editor. He graduated from the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Humanities at the University ELTE in Budapest. Afterwards, he worked as a journalist and as an English teacher. András Imreh has published numerous books of poetry and translations and has been the winner of many grants and prizes. He’s won the third and later the first place at the national translation competition of HOLMI magazine, the Soros Award for poetry (1998), the Wessely Prize for translating (1999), the Móricz Zsigmond Award for writers (2000), the Vas István Prize for poetry (2002) and the József Attila Prize for writing (2008), to name a few. He was also a writer and translator in residence in Vancouver, Palma de Mallorca and Buenos Aires and the winner of the three-month Snorri Sturluson grant in Reykjavik in 2011. For his time at the Villas Decius András Imreh – apart from finishing off his new book of poetry, completing it with poems on Central Europe – pursues a twofold aim. One is to get in touch with the Polish literary and social life and the other one is to publish an issue of the Nagyvilág magazine on contemporary Polish poetry.
Patrik Oriešek (1977) – freelance writer, translator and discussion moderator. He studied Ukrainian and Bulgarian philology at the University of Matej Bel in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia, and comparative literature at the university of Bratislava. After college he worked as a dramaturg and editor on Slovak Radio and Television (RTVS). He published articles and translations. Receiving a scholarship from the Villa Decius Association, Patrick Oriešek wants to write a series of texts focusing on the history of Ukraine and Central European ideological contexts of Ukraine in connection to Russian conceptualization of Ukraine as a state and cultural space.
Żanna Słoniowska (1978) – translator, writer. She studied at the department of editing at the Ukrainian Printing Academy in Lviv. Żanna Słoniowska worked as an instructor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, as a scriptwriter for historical programs on the public TV-channel TVP Historia and was the author of numerous articles published in Polish newspapers such as Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita and Tygodnik Powshechny. In 2011 Ms. Słoniowska won the second prize for her short story “Iwona” in the competition for the best prose work at the University of Gdanks and three years later she has been awarded the first prize for the best unpublished novel for her work “The House with the Stained-Glass Window” which was later on published by the renowned publishing house Znak. During her residency at the Villa Decius Ms. Słoniowska plans to conduct a study on the Polish-Ukrainian painter Leon Getz who will play a significant role in her next novel “The Lonely and Naked”.
Sára Vybíralová (1986) – writer and translator. She studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts at the Charles University in Prague. Currently, she participates in a bi-nationally supervised PhD program at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She published prose, poetry, reviews, critics, essays and translations. During her time at the Villa Decius Sára Vybíralová plans to prepare new texts in order to develop a second collection of short stories.
