Issue 24 – April 2006

New Competition Announcement

The Cultural Policy Education Group (CPEG, www.policiesforculture.org/cpeg) and Next Page Foundation are pleased to announce a joint call for applications within the Cultural Policy Translations Project. Publishers from Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia and Montenegro are eligible to apply for grants for translation and publication of books about cultural policy and management, recommended by CPEG’s university-members in these countries. The initiative is motivated by shortages of up-to-date literature in cultural policy and by the lack of related vocabulary in the targeted languages of the above mentioned countries.

Detailed information on the requirements and the application procedure can be found at www.npage.org and upon request from Milena Deleva, or Maria Velichkova. Application deadline is 15 May 2006.

A Reading Adventure for Romani Children from Bulgaria on the International Book Day

Ognyana, a ten-year-old Romani girl from 75th school in Fakulteta, the biggest Romani neighborhood in Sofia, reads the Little Mermaid aloud for 50 children from schools all over the city in the reading room of the Children’s Literature Department of the Sofia City Library. Ognyana is part of the group of Roma children who visited the library to participate in a special program organized for children to mark International Book Day on 19th April. The hosts organized a library tour for them, showcasing all children’s services offered by the library. The Roma children were invited to all future events happening between the bookshelves: exhibitions, Saturday reading workshops, story writing and illustrating sessions, meetings with authors, etc. Whereas most of the children were coming from schools from the city center and were already acquainted with the library, the Romani children were there for the first time, amazed at all the rooms full of books and the chance to touch, review or read more than 60 000 children’s editions! The children also visited the open book market just in front of the library afterwards, but were more fascinated by the fact they were in the city center for the first time.

The event was a good example of improving cultural accessibility for the Roma and raises many important questions. Why are so few Roma children able to take part in a library tour, a routine activity for most school-aged children? Is it due to passiveness or lack of reading habits? Or it is rather that being Roma or from any peripheral poor neighborhood implies lack of access to culture. Could it be parents’ fear of possible anti-Roma violence, or simply that a visit to the center requires money for transport that an average Roma family cannot afford?

New books published

Dragan Klaić: Exercises in Exile, translation into Croatian by Zdravko Zidovec (Antibarbarus, Zagreb 2006), supported by East Translates East Publications Project

The beautifully published by Antibarbarus Croatian edition of the book is a combination of an intriguing memoir of a Belgrade intellectual of Jewish origin, chased away by the Balkan conflicts that dragged on throughout the 1990’s, and profound analysis of the completely new conditions and requirements of nowadays exile.

The dialogue within an ‘imagined community’ of exiles goes across physical, generational, political and cultural boundaries and benefits from the instantaneous and easy communication on the Internet. Often centered at the long IKEA table in the author’s dining room, the cosmopolitan circle of old and newly made friends, engages in remembrances, disputes about the future and occasional ghost chasing of those who drifted away in the turmoil of the last decade.