DISTINGUISHED POLISH writer Pawel Huelle is the subject of a free public interview which takes place in Dublin at European Union House on Wednesday.
Huelle is an exciting and original writer. Two of his novels, Mercedes Benz (2006) and Castorp (2008) have been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize while Polish director, Wojciech Marczewski’s Weiser, a film version of Huelle’s outstanding first novel, Who Was David Weiser? (1987), will be screened tomorrow at the Irish Film Institute, Eustace Street.
The public interview will be conducted by Huelle’s gifted translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who has translated four of his books into English. Ms Lloyd-Jones won the 2009 Found in Translation Award for her translation of Huelle’s Last Supper.
Throughout his work Huelle, who was born in Gdansk in 1957, draws on the culture of his native city. A former press officer for Solidarity, he has worked as a print journalist and with Polish television. His profile in the West rests mainly on his wry, conversational and sophisticated fiction.
His best known work to date, Castorp, was inspired by a sentence in Thomas Mann’s European masterpiece, The Magic Mountain (1924) which refers to the period young Hans Castorp spent in Danzig, (now Gdansk) studying marine engineering. In his novel Huelle imagines the experiences Castorp had while in Danzig.
Huelle’s visit, which includes events in Belfast, is part of a series featuring Polish writers, “Irish Encounters with . . .” organised by the Ireland-Poland Cultural Foundation and the Polish embassy.