Award-winning Spanish-language author Valeria Luiselli and one of the most outstanding American writers George Saunders will be guests of the 13th Conrad Festival in Cracow. The slogan of this year’s edition is “The Nature of the Future” – announced the organizers.
The festival will last from the 18th to the 24th of October and will traditionally end with the presentation of the Conrad Prize.
“We have deliberately included an ambiguity in the slogan ‘The Nature of the Future’. The double meaning embedded in this headline is deliberate, as we wanted to ask questions about the nature of the future, or what the future is going to be and what is it going to bring, as well as about the nature in the future, focusing on the environmental aspect,” said Michał Paweł Markowski, Artistic Director of the Conrad Festival.
“The very term nature, which is rooted in Latin, has several meanings. In a literal sense, it means birth (from Latin word natus, meaning born and nasci – to be born). In our everyday discourse, we tend to use it to refer to the natural environment. Sometimes, we also resort to using it to denote the essence, the core of a thing, person or phenomenon. One can even employ it to point out the dominant feature of a thing, or even a layout or structure of some object – real or abstract. No meaning will be left behind,” organizers wrote on the Festival’s website.
As the organizers pointed out, the environment is degrading and “we are one step away from a climate catastrophe”. In their point of view, clean air, health, access to basic goods and services are slowly becoming unattainable, so the future is increasingly uncertain, and man continues to flaunt his apparent mastery over the world.