Eastern Express – Polish edition of “50 percent of the ratio” by Oleksandr Boychenko – a meeting
16:45-18:00
A meeting to promote the Polish edition of “50 percent of the ratio” by Oleksandr Boychenko (Lublin: Warsztaty Kultury 2016) Participants: Oleksandr Boychenko (author) and Bohdan Zadura (translator)
50 percent wrong is a collection of 50 texts which can be read as opinion journalism or autobiography. The stories contained in the collection are half literary and half journalistic ; they are 50 percent comical and 50 percent not quite so.
Oleksandr Boychenko (b.1970) – Ukrainian literary critic and academic, essayist, translator, felietonist. Author of collections of essays: “Something like Chautauqua” (2003), “Chautauqua Plus” (2004), “To book”(2011), “”My own among strangers” (2011), “50 percent of the ratio” (2015). Moreover, he has translated numerous texts from Polish and Russian, including Tadeusz Borowski, Leszek Kołakowski, Marek Hłasko, Jerzy Pilch, Olga Tokarczuk, Andrzej Stasiuk, Daniel Odija. A fellow of Gaude Polonia Scholarship granted by the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Poland (2005, 2008, 2013). In 2014, he was awarded A Medal For Merits to Polish Culture”.
Bohdan Zadura (b. 1945) – Polish poet, prose writer, translator and literary critic. Since 1975 he has been an editor of the literary qurterly „Akcent”, and a collaborator of „Literatura na Świecie”, the editor-in-chief of „Twórczość” (since 2004). He has won numerous literary awards, including : Stanisław Piętak award (1994), Józef Czechowicz award (2010), Silesius Award for the Book of the Year (2001), „Kyiv Laura” (2010), the Hungarian Gábor Bethlen award (2013), H. Skovoroda International Literary Prize(2014) and the Kovaliv Fund of the Ukrainia National Women’s League of America (2015) for popularising Ukrainian literature around the world. He has written over 20 collections of poetry. He is also a prose writer and a literary critic and a translator working in English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian and Hungarian.