First International Agnon Festival: Literary readings

Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, the Agnon Literary Center (Buchach, Ukraine) and the NGO “Publishers Forum” (Lviv, Ukraine) are supporters of the First International Agnon Festival, which will be held live via Zoom and Facebook between June 21, 2021–June 23, 2021. The panel “Ukrainian authors in Buchach” will feature Andrei Kurkov and Vasyl Makhno on Wednesday, June 23 at 19:00 Jerusalem and Kyiv time, 12:00 in New York. The festival promises three days of enlightening discussions about the legacies of Buchach-born Nobel Prize laureate SY Agnon and others. The full program is available here.

The Ukraine panel will also include discussion about the Agnon Literary Center’s writer’s residence, which is supported by UJE. We offer our readers excerpts of works by Andrei Kurkov, President of PEN Ukraine, and Vasyl Makhno, the first winner of “Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize,” as well as books of essays that are the result of the Agnon Literary Center’s writer’s residence, attended in 2019 by Vasyl Makhno, Oleksii Chupa, Yevhenia Kononenko (Light on the Hills) and in 2016 by Sofia Andrukhovych, Andriy Lyubka and Yevheniya Senik (The Key in the Pocket).

Andrey Kurkov, Grey Bees, MacLehose Press, 2020

PDF of excerpt is available here.

Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin, The Harvill Press, 2001

PDF of excerpt is available here.

Vasyl Makhno, Eternal Calendar, Old Lion Publishing House, 2019

PDF of excerpt is available here.

Vasyl Makhno, Enlightenment and Insight
(An excerpt from his latest yet to be published novel)

PDF of excerpt is available here.

Click here for PDF of Light on the Hills.
Click here for PDF of The Key in the Pocket (2017 edition, bi-lingual).
Click here for PDF of The Key in the Pocket (2018 edition, tri-lingual).

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