2024-05-23 07:11:39
Canadian author and historian Michael Ignatieff, whose e-book, O útěše, was not too long ago revealed in Czech, can be awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize for Social Sciences. In line with the AP company, it was introduced by the muse of Princess Leonor, the 18-year-old inheritor to the Spanish throne. The distinguished award related to a reward of fifty,000 euros, which is about 1.2 million crowns, is awarded.
The creator of greater than twenty books coping with human rights, economics, historical past or artwork can be honored for his “essential reflection on the basic conflicts of our time”, the muse defined. In line with her, Ignatieff’s books “in an important means assist readers to orientate themselves within the present scenario affected by conflict, a politically divided society and threats to freedom”.
The 77-year-old descendant of Russian immigrants held excessive positions on the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto. Most not too long ago, between 2016 and 2021, he was rector of the Central European College in Budapest. It was throughout his period that the federal government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was expelled from Hungary with an modification to the upper schooling regulation, aimed on the American billionaire of Hungarian origin and founding father of the varsity, George Soros. It was underneath Ignatieff’s management that the establishment moved to Vienna. “The Central European College was pressured to depart,” he regretted on the time.
Cowl of the Czech version of the e-book About Consolation: how you can reside with hope in darkish occasions. | Picture: Kalich publishing home
Ignatieff wrote books concerning the thinker Isaiah Berlin and the novel Scar Tissue, which was nominated for the Booker Prize. He contributes to publications such because the New York Occasions and the New York Assessment of Books. Within the years 2008 to 2011, he was the chairman of the Liberal Social gathering of Canada, and due to this fact the chief of the opposition there.
In a Czech translation by Jaroslav Hronk, the Kalich publishing home revealed Ignatieff’s e-book O útéše: jak zít s naděj in darkish occasions, containing reflections on about twenty personalities similar to Gustav Mahler, Albert Camus, Václav Havel and Michel de Montaigne, on the finish of final 12 months. Utilizing their instance, Ignatieff reveals how folks flip to one another in excessive conditions and the place they discover hope.
Firstly of the 12 months, the creator personally offered the e-book in Prague’s Václav Havel Library. “Comfort is a really old school phrase. It has nearly fallen out of the language. For millennia the phrase has had non secular connotations, describing our need to be saved, to be redeemed, to seek out which means in our struggling. To consider that after we lose somebody we love, we can be reunited with them we’ll meet in heaven. For millennia, comfort has introduced hope that our infinite, mindless struggling can be redeemed within the different world,” mentioned Ignatieff in Prague. “We’re nonetheless the heirs of this custom, even when right this moment we now not subscribe to the religion so strongly. However for my part, we’re much less secular than we faux to be. This language of salvation nonetheless haunts us,” he added.