For the fifth consecutive year Palazzo Grassi hosts Incroci di Civiltà, the International Festival of Literature promoted by Ca' Foscari University and the City of Venice. The festival, born in 2008, celebrates the long tradition of the city as a crossroads of cultures, people, languages and traditions, bringing authors and their readers into dialogue around the urgent issues of the contemporary.
Aleksandar Hemon (1964, Sarajevo)
He went to the United States for a cultural exchange program for journalists and was due to return to Sarajevo on 1 May 1992, when the siege of the city began. Since then he has remained in the United States where he has been granted asylum. Hemon began writing fiction in English in 1995. One of his first short stories, Islands, appeared in 1999 in Best American Short Stories. He is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Columbia College, Chicago.
Helena Janeczek (1964, Munich)
Born in a Jewish-Polish family; she has lived in Italy for over thirty years. After making her debut with the book of poems Ins Freie (1989), she chose Italian as a literary language. She is the author of Lezioni di tenebra (1997), Cibo (2002), Le rondini di Montecassino (2010), which have won numerous awards.
