The Instituto Polaco de Cultura and the Círculo de Bellas Artes invite to an unprecedented meeting with the award-winning Polish reporter Witold Szabłowski, who will talk with the writer and journalist Rubén Amón this afternoon at 6.30 pm in the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (Alcalá street, 42). Free admission until capacity is full.
Witold Szablowski is the author of several books, including Russia from the kitchen: knife, ladle and fork to build an empire (ed. Anaya, 2022), in which he shows how food has been a propaganda tool in Russia, not only in Soviet times.
Why did Putin invent the myth of his grandfather, Spiridon Putin, as a cook for the Tsarist and Soviet elites? What was the menu of the dinner that sealed the disintegration of the Soviet Union? Why did Brezhnev hate caviar? Witold Szablowski’s fascination with great politics from the perspective of cooking has led him to bring together both universes first in How to Feed a Dictator (ed. Anaya, 2021) and then in this his latest book published in Spain.
Polish journalist and reporter, at twenty-four years old Witold Szablowski worked as a chef in Copenhagen and at 25 became the youngest reporter of the weekly supplement of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, where he covered international stories in countries like Cuba, South Africa and Iceland. His work on various topics such as immigration, women, World War II or Turkey has received awards such as the European Parliament’s Journalism Prize, the Ryszard Kapuscinski Prize of the Polish Press Agency, the Beata Pawlak Prize, the English PEN Prize, The nomination for the Nike Prize and the Melchior Wankowicz Prize. In 2010, he was the first European journalist to reach Aung San Suu Kyi, then Myanmar’s prime minister, after her release from house arrest. That same year he published his first book, The Assassin from Apricot City.
Ruben Amón (1969) is a journalist and writer whose professional career began at 18 years old in Antena 3 Radio. From there he moved to El Mundo in 1990, working in Cultura before being sent on a war mission to the Balkans and as a correspondent in Rome and Paris. He has written for different foreign newspapers (Reforma de México, Corriere della sera, Libération), has been a columnist and reporter for El País and since 2019 is the writer of El Confidencial. His different books and essays, a dozen of them, cover topics as diverse as bulls, football, politics and opera. Since 2015 he has been collaborating with Carlos Alsina in the radio space Más de uno, by Onda Cero. He also currently directs and presents the weekly space La Cultureta at Onda Cero.
