1.9.2021: This year, I took part in the Seamus Heaney Poetry Summer School, led by Professor Nick Laird. It was brilliant, and I was grateful to be able to discuss my poetry with such a thoughtful group of people. On the 19th of September, I’ll be reading some of my poems alongside other participants in the summer school. The event is online and free to attend; more info here.
+++
25.8.2021: My translation of Eva von Redecker’s book Praxis and Revolution has been published by Columbia University Press. According to Wendy Brown, it’s “a wild dinner party of a political theory book”. It was great fun to translate.
+++
14.12.21: I was invited to read some of my poetry at the launch of Laura Theis’ new poetry collection, How to Extricate Yourself. Laura’s poetry always takes me by surprise. She is not afraid to confront the dark, strange sides of being human, and she does so with a particular lightness and humour, weaving together a complex network of German and English influences, from Mascha Kaléko to Ali Smith.
+++
2.11.2020: My text “Second Sight/Das zweite Gesicht” has been published by Nocturnal Unrest. Written in 2018 in response to Eva von Redecker’s “Lesbian Seeing“, it asks how visibility and seeing relate to each other in lesbian/bisexual/queer contexts.
+++
15.5.2020: I’ve been selected as an artist in residence for the Prosanova Festival of young German literature in Hildesheim! The festival is still going ahead as an online event, tickets will be available here soon.
+++
14.5.2020: My story, “The shoe which knew it was a loaf of bread” will be published later this year in the Conium Review. I am very fond of this story, which is inspired by a painting by Sereina Steinemann.
+++
6.5.2020: My poem, “Raymond’s Rivers”, has been published by BMP Voices. (It’s shortlisted in the Brain Mill Press National Poetry Month contest.) I’m excited that I’m not the only person in the world who enjoys poems that are basically emails with footnotes. Read it here.
+++
16.4.2020: I’ve been interviewed by Radio Prague about Michal Ajvaz’s book The Other City. It’s a great book about the human desire for meaning. Read or listen to the interview here.
+++
12.4.2020: My recommendation of t’ai freedom ford’s collection & more black (Augury Books, 2019) has been published as part of Rosebud Ben-Oni’s series, “Poets on Poets” in Kenyon Review. I was lucky to be taught by Rosebud Ben-Oni last year at a Speakeasy Project poetry workshop. She is brilliant (and a very patient teacher!) and she also has a new collection out at the moment.
+++
My impressions of the Bieler Gespräche were published online (in German), along with texts in French and Italian by Laurence Ermacova, Patrizia Romagnoli, Elda Pianezzi and Laura Di Corcia.
+++
11.3.2020: I’ll be reading at Kavka Art Bookshop to launch the Tiny Stories book. The illustrator, Pavlína Lörinczová, will also be there. (Image by Milan Kohout.)
+++
1.-2.2.2020: I’ll be taking part in the Bieler Gespräche 2020, a multilingual workshop for writers and translators.
16.6.2017: My poem “Still” was highly commended in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition. At the award ceremony, it was unexpectedly inspiring to hear about the children’s section of the competition. One of the primary school stories included one of the best lines I’ve read all year: “Medusa went into a forest to let her hair slither on the trees.” The judges’ comments can be read here.
+++
10.10.2015: David Vaughan from Radio Prague asked me about Czech and German authors, ‘magic Prague’ and Tendrils. Read or listen to the full interview here.
Jáchym Topol once said to me in an interview that there’s nothing he hates more than “Magic Prague”. But from what you’re suggesting perhaps he’s not quite telling the truth about himself.
“Yes. I can completely see where he’s coming from on that and I hate sentimentalized ideas of Prague too, but – yes – his Prague is full of magic. I think it’s a different kind of magic. It’s the dark magic that you hear in the songs of The Plastic People of the Universe. That’s also a kind of Magic Prague.”
Zuzi in particular is fighting the battle for self-determination, to no longer to be a projection of those who yearn after her; to portray herself, rather than be portrayed. Alena tells her, ‘There’s something about you which can’t be softened. (…) Something which can’t be smoothed out with brush strokes’. At the same time, the story of a country’s emancipation is being told: the Czech Republic. Ochre and Tomàš experienced and took part in the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Zuzi and Alena grew up in post-Soviet Czech Republic, but they are not unaffected by the past.
Lucy Duggan 
