GOTTLAND + discussion with author Mariusz Szczygieł

Box Office: 02074798940

This event combines the literary and the cinematic versions of ‘Gottland’.
The screening of the Czech film will be preceded by a discussion with author of the best-selling book Mariusz Szczygieł about the source of inspiration for his moving and at times shocking accounts of the life stories of: the film star who was Goebbels’ mistress; the despotic founder of a shoe-making empire; the sculptor who lost his life creating the world’s biggest monument to Stalin; the writer who reinvented himself for political survival; and the ‘human torch’ who copied Jan Palach’s fateful gesture as recently as 2003.

Gottland (FILM)
Dir. Lukáš Kokeš, Petr Hátle, Viera Čákanyová, Rozálie Kohoutová, Klára Tasovská, Radovan Síbrt
Czech Republic/Poland/Slovakia, 2014, 100 min

Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of
Czechoslovakia (BOOK)
By Mariusz Szczygieł
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Published by Melville House
Year: 2014

AUTHOR OF THE BOOK
Born in 1966, Mariusz Szczygieł has been a reporter for Gazeta Wyborcza since 1990. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his writing on Poland and Czechoslovakia, including the Europe Book Prize and the Prix l’Amphi for Gottland. From 1995-2001, he hosted his own talk show (Na każdy temat – ‘On Any Topic’), and he runs the Polish Reportage Institute in Warsaw together with Wojciech Tochman and Paweł Goźliński.

TRANSLATOR
Translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones is the pre-eminent translator of Polish reportage: the authors she has translated included Wojciech Tochman, Wojciech Jagielski, Jacek Hugo-Bader, and Ryszard Kapuscinski. She received the Found in Translation Award from the Polish Cultural Institute in 2008 for her translation of Pawell Huelle’s novel The Last Supper.

DEBATE will be chaired by Douglas Lytle
Douglas Lytle is former managing editor of The Prague Post. He is the author of Pink Tanks & Velvet Hangovers: An American in Prague, an account of his experiences of life in Prague in the early years of Czech independence. He is former bureau chief for Bloomberg News in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and now a senior editor at Bloomberg in London.

This event is organised by the Polish Cultural Institute in partnership with Czech Centre London and The Frontline Club.