Join us for a brief segment of three book launches: Olga Stehlíková's selected poems in English, trans. David Vichnar (Blue Diode Press, 2024), Louis Armand's Infantilisms (Puncher & Wattman, 2024), and Bartholomew Ryan's Fernando Pessoa--Critical Lives (Reaktion Books, 2024).
Olga Stehlíková works as a freelance writer, book editor and critic. She has edited dozens of books of poetry and prose for various Czech publishing houses and her poems have appeared in many Czech and foreign literary magazines. Her debut book of poetry, Týdny (Weeks, Dauphin 2014), won the Magnesia Litera Book Prize for poetry. Her second collection of short poems Vejce/Eggs was published in 2017 in a unique edition, together with an LP album with music by Tomáš Braun. Her third collection was An Exclamation Point as High as a Pole (2018). Her fourth collection, The Siren’s Song, was published in 2022. She also published separately a single poem "What a Mother Speaks of When She is Silent," in 2021. Olga’s poems have been translated into seventeen languages. She has also published six award-winning children’s books and was awarded the first Critic of the Year Award in 2018. Though the Sky Is Embroidered by a Zigzagging Bat is the first comprehensive selection of her poems to be published as a book in English translation.
Louis Armand is a writer, artist & theorist. His most recent works of criticism are Entropology (published by Anti-Oedipus Press) & Festins de Desmando, trans. Jorge Pereirinha Pires (Barco Bêbado), both 2023. He is the author of the novels The Garden (2001), Cairo (2014), The Combinations (2016), Vampyr (2020) & Glitchhead (2021). His poetry collections include DI/ODE (2023), Letters from Ausland (2011), East Broadway Rundown (2015), & Monument (with John Kinsella, 2020). His work has been anthologised in Thirty Australian Poets, Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets & The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry. Edited volumes include Mind Factory (2005), Contemporary Poetics (2007), Pornotopias (2008) & City Primeval: New York, Berlin, Prague (with Robert Carrithers, 2017). He directs the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory at Charles University, Prague.
Bartholomew Ryan is a philosopher, musician, and researcher at IFILNOVA, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is the coordinator of the research group ‘Forms of Life and Practices of Philosophy’ at IFILNOVA. Amongst his various publications interpenetrating philosophy and literature, he is the author of Critical Lives: Fernando Pessoa (Reaktion Books, 2024) and Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno (Brill, 2014), and co-editor of Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). He is currently writing a book called James Joyce: The Unfolding Art of Flourishing and Decay, which will be published by Oxford University Press. In music, he leads the international band The Loafing Heroes, releasing six albums; released a solo album called Jabuti (under the name Loafing Hero) in 2022; and is a member of the experimental audio formation Headfoot.