Evenings with Reporters / Kapuściński in the Heart of Darkness
- Where: Václav Havel Library, Ostrovní 13, Prague 110 00
- When: December 4, 2017, 19:00 – 21:00
The legendary Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuściński visited Congo, Iran and the Soviet Union and was present during the world’s most dangerous conflicts. How his texts have influenced today’s reporters and how their work is changing will be discussed by Mariusz Szczygieł and Josef Pazderka. During the evening Kapuściński’s book Shah of Shahs (published in Czech by Absynt, 2017) about the fall of the shah Reza Pahlavi and the Iranian revolution will be presented. This is the first complete Czech publication of the book, in a translation by Dušan Provazník and Helena Stachová, who will be present at the gathering. The evening will conclude with the announcement of the results of the competition Divided World – Divided People competition, which has been run by the Polish Institute in Prague in connection with the Year of Conrad.
Mariusz Szczygieł is a reporter and journalist who along with Wojciech Tochman and Paweł Goźliński established the Institute of Reportage, which features a writing school, bookshop and literary café, and headed the reporters section of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza. His book Gottland became a bestseller, earned a number of prestigious awards and gave rise to two theatre productions. The publishers Jaroslava Jiskrová – Máj a Dokořán have also issued in Czech his books Make Your Own Paradise, Libůstka, Celestial Love and Project: Truth. As well as being a well-known reporter, Szczygieł is an expert on and promoter of classic and contemporary Polish reportage.
A journalist and reporter, Josef Pazderka has worked for the organisation People in Need and was Czech Television’s correspondent in Russia and, from 2012 to 2016, in Poland. Today he is editor-in-chief of Aktuálně.cz. He received the Journalism Prize for his written and broadcast reports from South Ossetia and Somalia as well as for his reporting work in Ukraine.
The novel Heart of Darkness (1899) by the Polish-born prose writer Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) is a dark story of the human soul in the colonial era. To this day we encounter the division of people into superior and inferior, civilised and savage, modern and backwards. Foreign reporting, dispatches from more or less remote spots, are not only attractive exotic stories but also a metaphor for our society and its prejudices. This is one possible reading of the powerful and gripping books of Ryszard Kapuściński, who in his wanderings as a reporter reached – just like Conrad’s hero Marlow – the Heart of Darkness.