A reading with Austrian novelist, playwright, translator and poet Zdenka Becker as part of the Conference ‘The Fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’ and the Culture of Europe 1989 – 2009’. Becker was born in the Czech Republic, grew up in Bratislava and studied in Bratislava and Vienna.  Living in Vienna since 1974 she began to write in German in 1986.  Zdenka Becker’s work has been translated into several languages and includes the screenplay for Berg for Austrian television (1994), the anthology Goodbye, Galina (2001) and the novel Die Toechter der Roza Bukovska (The daughters of Roza Bukovska, 2006).  Her most recent novel Taubenflug (Silent Flight, 2009) traces the love of two childhood sweethearts, seperated in 1968 at the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and is set against a changing political backdrop, with characters and locations responding to the occupation and, in 1989, to the Velvet Revolution.

The conference takes place Thursday 26 November & Friday 27 November and is organized by Peter Barta, University of Surrey, with the support of the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London, The Austrian Cultural Forum London as well as the Embassies of Austria and Hungary in the UK.  For more information on this conference click here.