Festival of Writers in Prague

Beginning June 5 in Prague, the twentieth annual Festival of Writers will examine the writer's role as a societal heretic and political rebel.

Herta Muller, Gao Xingjian, and Derek Walcott, all Nobel Prize laureates, will attend the conference, in addition to eleven other writers from various countries celebrated for their heterodox writings and views.

Peter Matthiessen, a U.S. novelist, will receive the Spiros Vergos Prize for Freedom of Expression, named for the Greek poet who exiled himself from his country during a military dictatorship in the late sixties and early seventies in order to fight for the restoration of democracy.