We invite you to a meeting with one of the most important writers of Central Europe – Drago Jančar – about the book “Archipelagi. A Personal Atlas of Questions and Experiences”. On Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 6:00 PM at MCK the author will speak about the places and experiences that shaped his thinking on history, memory and the responsibility of the writer. The conversation will be led by Dr. Dominika Kaniecka.
During the discussion we will talk about Drago Jančar's essays, which form a map of Europe seen from the perspective of individual fate – full of fractures, contradictions and recurring traumas. The conversation will also concern the role of literature as a tool of conscience, the way of telling about 20th-century violence and the meaning of the concept of Central Europe today.
The book “Archipelagi. A Personal Atlas of Questions and Experiences” – the second volume of the iSTER series edited by Łukasz Galusek, Paulina Małochleb and Bartosz Sadulski – was translated from Slovenian by Nikodem Szczygłowski and Joanna Pomorska. The publication is available on site at the “w środku” MCK bookstore and online: https://ksiegarniamck.pl/.
Drago Jančar – a Slovenian writer, playwright and essayist, one of the most important contemporary Central European authors. His novels, short stories and plays are regarded as milestones of Slovenian prose, translated into many languages and acclaimed worldwide. Trained as a lawyer, he worked as an editor at the Maribor daily “Večer”, and from 1981 to 2016 was associated with the cultural-scientific association Slovenska matica in Ljubljana as an editor and secretary. He is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature — Österreichischer Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur (2020). Dr. Dominika Kaniecka – a graduate in Croatian studies, since 2014 an assistant professor at the Institute of Slavic Philology at Jagiellonian University, she also worked at the University of Zagreb and promoted Polish culture in Croatia on behalf of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland. A member and co-founder of the interinstitutional Post-Yugoslav Area Workshop at the University of Warsaw, a member of the Slavonic Culture Commission of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016–2025) and the Polish Commission for the History and Culture of the Balkans (AIESEE). She coordinated the Polish part of the international translation project “Odnalezione w przekładzie”. She participated in the work on the Encyclopedia of Croatian Literature within the project carried out at the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographical Department in Zagreb.
