Jan Michalski (1953-2002) was a Polish/Swiss/French book publisher who, along with Vera Michalski-Hoffmann, [1] founded the Jan Michalski Foundation in Montricher, Switzerland [2] which awards the annual Jan Michalski Prize in literature. [3]
Jan Michalski (1953-2002) was a Polish/Swiss/French book publisher who, along with Vera Michalski-Hoffmann, [1] founded the Jan Michalski Foundation in Montricher, Switzerland [2] which awards the annual Jan Michalski Prize in literature. [3]
In 1986, Michalski and Vera Michalski-Hoffmann created Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc to publish Slavic writers of novels, short stories, plays and poetry as well as non-fiction essays, documents, personal journals and memoires. [4] Noir sur Blanc was created in Romandy, then in Paris in 1990 and Warsaw in 1991. [5] One of the first texts published was Proust contre la déchéance, a short essay written by the painter Józef Czapski between 1940 and 1941 when a prisoner in the Starobyelsk camp in the Soviet Union. [6]
Subsequently, the (now married) couple acquired several publishing houses that were later brought together under the Lausanne-based holding group Libella. The holding now includes Noir sur Blanc, Les Éditions Phébus , Buchet-Chastel and Le Temps Apprivoisé, among others. They published in Polish books by Umberto Eco, Charles Bukowski, Henry Millar, Blaise Cendrars and many others. Polish authors, such as Sławomir Mrożek were translated into French and English and sold in their Librairie Polonaise book store, located on Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris, which still exists. Subsequently, in 2000, they founded the Libella editorial group. [7]
In 2002, following the premature death of Jan Michalski at age 49, Hoffmann continued the project which resulted in the creation of the Jan Michalski Foundation in 2004. The Jan Michalski Foundation, inaugurated in 2013, offers a large multilingual book library of 80,000 volumes, an auditorium, an exhibition hall, a literary café and cabins used as writing residences. The foundation awards an annual prize, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature.
The Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". The prize carries a symbolic reward of only 10 euros, but results in considerable recognition and book sales for the winning author. Four other prizes are also awarded: prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle, prix Goncourt de la Poésie (poetry) and prix Goncourt de la Biographie (biography). Of the "big six" French literary awards, the Prix Goncourt is the best known and most prestigious. The other major literary prizes include the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française, the Prix Femina, the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Interallié and the Prix Médicis.
F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, commonly known as Roche, is a Swiss multinational holding healthcare company that operates worldwide under two divisions: Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics. Its holding company, Roche Holding AG, has shares listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. The company headquarters are located in Basel. Roche is the fifth-largest pharmaceutical company in the world by revenue and the leading provider of cancer treatments globally. In 2023, the company’s seat in Forbes Global 2000 was 76.
Boubacar Boris Diop is a Senegalese novelist, journalist and screenwriter. His best known work, Murambi, le livre des ossements, is the fictional account of a notorious massacre during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. He is also the founder of Sol, an independent newspaper in Senegal, and the author of many books, political works, plays and screenplays. Doomi Golo (2003) is one of the only novels ever written in Wolof; it deals with the life of a Senegalese Wolof family. The book was published by Papyrus Afrique, Dakar.
Hervé Le Tellier is a French writer and linguist, and a member of the international literary group Oulipo. He is its fourth president. Other notable members have included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Jacques Roubaud, Jean Lescure and Harry Mathews. He won the 2020 Prix Goncourt for The Anomaly.
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.
Janusz Andrzej Głowacki, better known as Janusz Głowacki or colloquially simply as Głowa, was a Polish playwright, essayist and screenwriter. Głowacki was the recipient of multiple awards and honours, including Guggenheim Fellowship, two Nike Award nominations and BAFTA Award nomination. He was awarded the Gloria Artis Gold Medal in 2005 for his contribution to Polish culture, and in 2014, the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.
Józef Czapski was a Polish artist, author, and critic, as well as an officer of the Polish Army. As a painter, he is notable for his membership in the Kapist movement, which was heavily influenced by Cézanne. Following the Polish Defensive War, he was made a prisoner of war by the Soviets and was among the very few officers to survive the Katyn massacre of 1940. Following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, he was an official envoy of the Polish government searching for the missing Polish officers in Russia. After World War II, he remained in exile in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte, where he was among the founders of Kultura monthly, one of the most influential Polish cultural journals of the 20th century.
Patrick Conrad is a Flemish painter, poet, screenwriter and novelist, and one of the founders of The Pink Poets. He also directed about twenty movies for cinema and television, including – selected for the Cannes Festival - the international cult film Mascara. As a painter and collage artist he showed his Work in about 40 solo exhibitions in Belgium and France and three retrospective exhibitions of his work: in 1975, in 2005 and in 2022 in the Verbeke Foundation. His work is part of important private collections in France, Belgium, England, Scotland, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Australia and U.S. He lived 34 years in the south of France and moved in 2023 to Porto Alegre (Brasil). In Belgium he is represented by the Paul Verbeke galery which published an artbook about his work.
Zofia Romanowicz was a Polish émigré novelist, essayist, poet, and translator and an eminent member of the Polish literary and cultural communities in exile as well as Parisian intellectual circles.
Frédéric Martel is a French writer, researcher and journalist. His most famous books are The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968 (1996), Mainstream (2010) and In the Closet of the Vatican (2019), a New York Times bestseller.
Jan Michalski Prize for Literature is a Swiss literary prize for any work of fiction or non-fiction published anywhere in the world in any language. It is meant to recognize authors from around the world and world literature in general. The jury is multicultural and multilingual in composition.
Michalski is a Polish surname. It may refer to:
Agata Tuszynska is a Polish writer, poet and journalist.
Steve Sem-Sandberg is a Swedish journalist, novelist, non-fiction writer and translator. He made his literary debut in 1976 with the two science fiction novels Sländornas värld and Sökare i dödsskuggan. He was awarded the Dobloug Prize for fiction in 2005.
"Hoffmann-La Roche Family Pool Loses Voting Majority in Roche". Bloomberg. 2011-03-25. Retrieved 2024-03-29.
Maja Hoffmann is a Swiss art collector, art patron, documentary producer, impresario, and businesswoman. She is the founder and president of the LUMA Foundation. She is also part of the shareholder pool made up of descendants of the founder of the Roche Holding AG, which controls the Swiss health-care company Hoffmann-La Roche.
The two Henkin brothers,Evgeny and Yakov, were significant early 20th century amateur street and documentary photographers who primarily recorded the daily life of, respectively, Berlin, Germany and Leningrad, Russia, in the late 1920s and 1930s, during the interwar years. Their photographs, mostly never printed in their lifetimes and kept as negatives, were re-discovered by the descendants of Yakov Henkin in the late 2000s. This collection, known as the Henkin Brothers Archive, consists of around 7000 frames of photography.
Wojciech Karpiński was a Polish writer, historian of ideas and literary critic.
Frédéric Pajak is a French illustrator and writer. He was born in Hauts-de-Seine. He is the first author to win the Prix Médicis Essai for non-fiction with a graphic work.
Éditions L'Âge d'Homme is a publishing company founded in Lausanne in 1966 by Vladimir Dimitrijević.