War, literature, and ethics - a debate

The award of this year's Nobel Prize for literature triggered heated debates in European feuilletons, raising a number of fundamental questions that go beyond the case of Peter Handke. Do writers have any special moral obligations in virtue of practicing their craft? Is the realm of the aesthetic separated from the public persona of the writer? Writers, poetry translators and literary critics will discuss these and related questions and explore the writers’ responsibility in the time of war and other humanitarian disasters, as well as the possible approaches to the question of recognition of the artistic merits of the work produced by writers who hold ethically problematic views.