Ten years on from the Islamist terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, freedom of expression is still the satirical newspaper’s guiding principle. Is France of today still Charlie? Are artists, writers, and journalists compromising on the responsibility to uphold freedom of speech by considering the potential consequences of their actions? Writer and translator Patrik Ouředník will discuss questions of free speech vs. self-censorship with the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, Gérard Biard. Hosted by Guillaume Basset.

In partnership with IFP and the French Embassy in Prague.

Gérard Biard is a French journalist and editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. He believes that we can laugh at anything and that the only valid question is why we laugh at it. He has been associated with Charlie Hebdo since 1992. When the magazine’s Paris office was targeted in a terrorist attack in January 2015, Biard was in London for a conference. In May 2015, Biard and film critic Jean-Baptiste Thoret accepted the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award on behalf of Charlie Hebdo.

Patrik Ouředník is an author and translator who writes in Czech and French. He lives in France, where he emigrated in 1984. His prose works Case Closed (2010), The Opportune Moment, 1855 (2011), The Antialkoran, or The Unclear World of T. H. (Antialkorán aneb nejasný svět T. H., 2017), and especially Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (2005) have achieved great international acclaim. The latter book has been published in nearly forty languages and is thus the most translated Czech book since 1989. His latest novel is The End of the World Might Not Have Taken Place (2019). He has translated works by Samuel Beckett, Boris Vian, Alfred Jarry, and François Rabelais into Czech. Ouředník has received numerous foreign and Czech awards, including the Czech State Award for Literature (2014).

Guillaume Basset is a French writer who lives in Prague. He is currently the programme director of the international book fair and literary festival Book World Prague. In the past he was the deputy director of the Prague Writers’ Festival and worked for the Alliance Française de Lyon. He also gained experience in the field while organising a literary festival in Hong Kong. He has published poems in the French magazines Mercure liquide, Verso, Provisoire, and Zone. His first work, The Fire of Your Closeness (Oheň tvých blízkostí, 2017), was published bilingually in Czech and the original French by the publishing house Dauphin.