Registration for participating in the conference is open until 16:00 on 29 April. Registration is compulsory.

In Latvia, no one has better demonstrated the dilemmas faced by writers who are engaged in politics, the inherent conflict between truth and power, than the eminent literary couple known by their pseudonyms, Rainis and Aspazija. At the forefront of the romantic revolutionary New Current movement in Latvia at the close of the 19th century, Rainis and Aspazija were called upon to be prophets, priests, voices of the oppressed, and politicians. For a fleeting moment before the 1905 revolution, truth and power were one, and Rainis and Aspazija embodied both. However, upon returning from Swiss exile to an independent Latvia in 1920, both writers found that they could no longer merge their literary and political personas in the same seamless way as they had done before. In the new democratic state, an undetected line of demarcation between the role of the writer and the role of the politician had emerged.

At this conference, writers, historians, literary scholars, and cultural critics will seek the answers to many questions: is the relationship between the writer and power, in contemporary Europe, as pertinent a subject as it once was? What is the role of authors in the formation of ideologies and the legitimisation of political systems? What are the consequences for writers who are in opposition to political regimes?How is this affected by the advent of globalisation and digitalisation? What do today's European writers have to say about inequality, discrimination, oppression, corruption, and poverty? What is the future of Europe as envisioned by today's writers? If ideas and ideals, not only a common market and supra-national institutions, are essential to Europe, then what form do they take?

The interdisciplinary conference is organised by the National Library of Latvia and the Secretariat of the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

For more information visit the official webpage of the conference.