(27 October, 2016) The Italian Language in the World Week comes to a conclusion. The Italian writer, Claudio Magris will be awared the International Franz Kafka Literary Award this afternoon in Prague. After this, all the events organised by the Czech Republic and the Italian Cultural Institute and the Italian Embassy for the occasion of the 16th Italian Language in the World Week. Claudio Magris admitted, “when it was announced that I would received the award, I thought it was a joke. Not because of false modesty, but to hear my name in the same sentence as Kafka’s was an honour and moving. Kafka is the one author that comes close to my way of understanding the world and I share the same sentiment that writing is necessary in order to survive and to seize life. The striking thing is that Kafka, despite or thanks to his extreme modernity, incarnating all the good and evil of the modern man, is the only writer of the 20th century who has achieved a great literary work that give a complete sense of what life and the sacred is about, perhaps only second to Dostoevkij. Claudio Magris is among the renowned writers and poets awarded in the past such Philip Roth, Ivan Klíma, Harold Pinter, Haruki Murakami, Yves Bonnefoy, Arnošt Lustig, Peter Handke, Václav Havel, John Banville and Amos Oz. The eve of the award ceremony, Magris accompanied by the director of the Franz Kafka Society, Markéta Mališová, participated in a literary encounter in the Baroque Chapel of the Italian Cultural Institute, organised by the director of the Italian Studies Department of the University of Carolina and a Modern Languages scholar, Jirí Pelán. Magris addressed the public among whom was also Italian Ambassador, Aldo Amati. He talked about some of the emerging themes in his literary research such as the Hapsburgian myth, estrangement, diaspora and exile, places and landscapes that are constitutive elements of someone’s past experience, the issue of obsessive identity of symbolic cities such as Prague or Trieste, Jewish culture; as a response to the tragedies of the world. (Red)
