Bestselling author Jonathan Lethem scheduled to appear at the Prague Writer's Festival

The annual Prague Writer’s Festival returns this fall with a handful of Czech and American authors.

Big names coming to the festival include American novelist and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jonathan Lethem, Romanian author Ana Blandiana, Czech author and poet Jiří Hájíček, author Evan Kennedy, French-Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Italian poet Claudio Pozzani and Greek writer Ersi Sotiropoulos. The festival runs from October 8 to 11 and is slated to take place in locations around Prague including the St. Agnes Monastery.

Novelist Lethem started his career with his first novel, “Gun, and Occasional Music,” in the mid-1990s. Right before the turn of the century, he published “Motherless Brooklyn,” a popular novel that won him the National Book Critics Circle Award and was made into a film directed by Edward Norton in 2019. Several years later, his novel “The Fortress of Solitude” became a New York Times bestseller.

This year’s theme is “We are condemned to hope.” The program for fall has not yet been released, though at press time dates had not yet been changed due to coronavirus travel restrictions. In the past, the festival has included discussions with authors, readings from authors, and film screenings.

The Prague Writers’ Festival is an annual literary festival in Prague, Czech Republic, taking place every spring since 1991. In 2005 the festival was also held in Vienna. Many of the events are broadcast via the internet. International literary figures to have appeared at the festival include John Banville, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Salman Rushdie, Irvine Welsh, William Styron, and Nadine Gordimer.