10th Wrocław Reading Marathon
This Saturday, September 7, the 10th anniversary Wrocław Reading Marathon will take place at the FOTO-GEN Gallery. 100 people, representatives of the world of culture, media, science, local government and non-governmental organizations, will take part in the joint reading. This year’s marathon reading will be one of the best books by Marek Hłasko entitled “Beautiful twentysomethings.”
– This is already the 10th marathon. The campaign, which started spontaneously in 2018, is still ongoing, and there is no shortage of people willing to take part in shared reading. This is definitely a reason to be proud and happy. All the more so because it is a completely grassroots initiative in which the participants and organizers are volunteers. The intention of the marathon is still the same: we encourage reading books, we remind important authors and interesting titles, but the communal and integrative spirit of the action is equally important – a meeting among people who really love books – says Jarosław Perduta, the initiator and organizer of the action.
The Wrocław Reading Marathon is a cyclical, public reading of a selected book in its entirety, without abbreviations or changes, in the form of a relay, in which subsequent readers present fragments of the work assigned to them. In this way, in the previous 9 editions, works by authors such as: Stefan Żeromski, Bruno Schulz, Olga Tokarczuk, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Mikhail Bułgakov, Serhij Żadan, Marek Krajewski, Filip Zawada and Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak were read.
This Saturday, participants of the anniversary marathon will read Marek Hłasko’s autobiographical book entitled “Beautiful twentysomethings.” The choice of this particular author and title is not accidental. Marek Hłasko, often referred to as the Polish James Dean, is one of the most important and interesting young Polish writers of the 1950s, a screenwriter, a great confluence of Polish culture, an outstanding and tragic figure for many reasons.
– This is the year of Marek Hłasko, a unique author in the history of Polish literature, a writer unwanted in the Polish People’s Republic, one of the most outstanding young writers of the turn of 1956. It’s good that his work will appear within the walls of our Foto-Gen gallery and it’s good that we will take part in the celebration of the Year of Marek Hłasko in Lower Silesia – says Igor Wójcik, director of the Center for Culture and Art, co-host of the event – especially since is an artist closely connected with Wrocław and Lower Silesia.
Many Wrocław artists, journalists and people from the world of culture read, including: Halina Rasiakówna, Konrad Imiela, Tomasz Lulek, Justyna Szafran, Emose Uhunmwangho, Anna Kieca, Maciej Kurowicki, Cezary Studniak, Helena Sujecka, Anna Krotoska, Agnieszka Zwiefka, Jakub Olejnik and many others.
Start at 11:00, finish shortly after 18:00, with a short technical break at 14.00. The entire event will be broadcast online on the Wrocław Czyta website.