KROKODIL 2024 Festival Highlights

27 May KROKODIL 2024 Festival Highlights

This year’s KROKODIL festival promises a top-notch literary event with the participation of three renowned international authors: Mathias Enard, Arnon Grunberg, and Hassan Blasim. Program download HERE

Mathias Enard studied Persian and Arabic and spent a long time in the Middle East. He lives in Barcelona. Enard’s novel “Zone” was declared one of the most original books of the decade by critics and received numerous French and international literary awards. For his novel “Compass,” he was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2015. His novel “The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Brotherhood” was published by Akademska knjiga in 2023.

Arnon Grunberg is a Dutch writer of novels, essays, and columns. He grew up in Amsterdam in a Jewish immigrant family and was expelled from high school at seventeen. In 1990, he founded his own publishing house, Kasimir, and wrote several plays. In 1994, at the age of twenty-three, he debuted with his first novel, “Blue Mondays,” for which he received several Dutch awards, including the Anton Wachter Prize and the De Gouden Ezelsoor, an award for the best-selling literary debut. He has since written sixteen novels, including “Silent Extras,” “Phantom Pain,” and “The Jewish Messiah.”

Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi writer currently living in Finland. He was born in Baghdad in 1973 and studied at the Academy of Cinematic Arts in the city, where he made two films, “Gardenia” and “White Clay.” In 1998, after several arrests, his professors advised him to leave Baghdad due to the political and critical tones of his films, which attracted the attention of Saddam’s regime informants at the Academy. He fled and finally settled in Finland in 2004 after years of illegal travel through Europe as a refugee. His debut collection, “The Madman of Freedom Square,” was published by Comma Press in 2009, and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010. His second collection, “The Iraqi Christ,” was published by Comma Press in April 2013 and won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014 – the first Arabic title and the first short story collection to win this award. Hassan’s works have been translated into over 20 languages.