The State of European Literature is an annual lecture delivered by a prominent author or poet of international renown about the state of literature and Europe from the perspective of literature.

Andrey Kurkov (1961), born in Russia, is a Ukrainian novelist who writes in Russian and Ukrainian. He is the author of over 20 novels and 10 books for children. His work is currently translated into 45 languages. His books are full of black humour, post-Soviet reality and elements of surrealism. Apart from fiction, Kurkov writes essays and diaries about the current situation in Ukraine and about the history and culture of the country. These essays and articles are regularly published in The Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman, The Spectator and other media.

Unfinished books

In his lecture 'An Orchard of Unfinished Books', Kurkov will reflect on the following theme:

Where authors have become trees,
That no longer bear fruit.
How to cure wounded literature and bring life back to the orchard.

Famous unfinished books
Every dead author has a last book. It’s either finished or unfinished.
Books left unfinished due to natural causes are simply a good quest, some of them were finished by friends, relatives or fans, sometimes decades after the writer’s death.

Books left unfinished because the author was killed belong to a different category of unfinished books. They may remain unfinished forever, turning into monuments to the writer’s unjust death, while the absence of an ending can provoke more reflection than the text that was written before a bullet or a missile interrupted the writing process.

Each man and woman is a novel, every child is a story, each country is also a story or set of stories.  These stories are happily or unhappily interacting and thus creating the reflection of what we are calling “life”.

Geopolitical story-telling – this is what Ukrainian writers are doing now. They are trying to explain the story of Ukraine and how, in Russia, Ukraine’s authentic story has stirred a desire to destroy its authors and, indeed, the story itself.

State of European Literature

The State of European Literature is an annual lecture delivered by a prominent author or poet of international renown about the state of literature and Europe from the perspective of literature.

Today, stories are still written and read in all European languages about the continent, the lives of its inhabitants, its neighbours and its ever-changing role in the present, the past and the future. As a result of political polarisation and disagreement about the actual state of the continent at present (whether that concerns current geopolitical upheavals, transnational legacies, such as colonialism, climate change, the distribution of wealth or the demographic future), there is a renewed desire for the truth that literary fiction provides, and the power and precision of poetic expression. Whether that is about the supposed limits of literary imagination in discussions about identity, emancipation, gender and decolonisation, disputed memories, or the increasing dominance of English as shared European language, literature seems to be as urgent as ever in this day and age. The State of European Literature wants to increase awareness about the key role that the core values of literature and culture play when it comes to the current and future state of Europe: curiosity, imagination, reflection, criticism, translation, power of expression, tradition and invention.

The State of European Literature is organised by the Faculty of Humanities of the UvA , in collaboration with the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES), the Amsterdam School for Regional and Transnational and European Studies (ARTES), the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL), the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam (DIA) and SPUI25.