ELKOST International literary agency - Ludmila Ulitskaya awarded Premio Bauer/Ca’Foscari at Crossings of Civilizations Venice International Literary Festival in Italy, 20/05/2010

http://www.incrocidicivilta.org/

The literary event Incroci di civiltà (Crossings of Civilizations) will take place in Venice, Italy from May 20 to 22, 2010.

Incroci di civiltà is an international literary festival that celebrates the long-standing tradition of Venice as the meeting place of peoples and cultures. Its first edition was held in 2008 and past guests include Orhan Pamuk, Anita Desai, Javier Marias, Salman Rushdie, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Robert Coover, Yves Bonnefoy, Elias Khuri, Kiran Desai. Festival's main goal is to have a small and select number of poets and novelists dialogue with their readers in the beautiful environment of the city of Venice.

In Love with a Pencil, essays by Sasha Okun (NF)

Rights sold: Russia - SLOVO

The book was created as a textbook on pencil drawing techniques for beginners and professionals, but it is in fact something much more broad and interesting than just a manual on drawing. It is rather a manual on artistic perception of reality.

"All great masters of the past regardless of their main craft, be it sculpture or painting, were great draftsmen: Rubens, Rembrandt, Matisse, Picasso, Moore, Rodin... Drawing is the foundation, the cornerstone of any visual art. There's an endless amount of books and manuals about the art of drawing. Among them, there are bad, good, and very good ones. The question is, why write yet one more? The fact is that regardless of their quality, all of these books answer the question "how"? Some of them are even entitled "How to draw a portrait (landscape, model, still life, hands, etc.)." However, in my humble opinion...

GODS OF THE STEPPE, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov

Rights sold: France - ACTES SUD, Bulgaria - ENTHUSIAST, Russia - EKSMO, World English - AMAZON CROSSING

It is the summer of 1945. Germany has been defeated, Hitler has disappeared, and tensions are mounting ever higher along the Russian-Chinese border…where the threat of Japanese invasion haunts.

For Petka, no life could be more thrilling and glorious than marching into battle alongside the Red Army. But he is only twelve, the bastard child of a fractured family, trapped in a village too tiny for his bursting spirit. So he must make his own adventure wherever he can find it. And if that means passing off a wolf cub as a puppy under the nose of his ferocious grandma, stealing bootleg alcohol for the bivouacked troops he worships, smuggling himself in a barrel across the border and into the line of fire, fighting for his life when his own aimless peers turn...

Ludmila Ulitskaya awarded Premio Bauer/Ca’Foscari at Crossings of Civilizations Venice International Literary Festival in Italy, 20/05/2010

Featured titles

In Love with a Pencil, essays by Sasha Okun (NF)

GODS OF THE STEPPE, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov