In February, Bucharest will host the Odesa International Literary Festival, a traditional literary event launched in 2015 that, due to the war in the last two years, has become a traveling project: in 2023, it took place in Batumi, Georgia. , and this year it takes place in the capital of Romania. The festival will take place on February 22-25 at the headquarters of the Goethe-Institut in Bucharest (Calea Dorobanti 32), News.ro reports.

Ukrainian writers Iya Kiva, Yurii Vinytsyuk and Vasyl Makhno, Philip Sands from Great Britain, Olivier Guez from France, Daniel Kelman and Norman Ohler from Germany, Karl-Marcus Gauss from Austria, Ariane von Graffenried and Jonas Lüscher from Switzerland and Ilaria Gaspari from Italy, literature lovers will be able to follow them at public readings and debates during the five days of the festival. They were joined by the best names of contemporary Romanian literature, such as Nora Yuga, Dan Sociu, Nikita Danilov and Radu Vancu.

The program combines 19 events that will take place both in the physical presence of writers and through their online participation.

Among the topics of this year’s Odessa International Literary Festival, which is held in Bucharest, are the future of Europe, the freedom of the writer, the power of writing and the word to fight against barbarism, literary relations between the countries of the Black Sea region. Ukrainian literature will be the topic of world reading on February 24, two years before the start of the war. On this occasion, they will read poems signed by Ukrainian writers Victoria Amelina and Maksym Kryvtsov, who went missing during the war.

“I am glad that we can host the 9th Odesa International Literary Festival in Bucharest to demonstrate solidarity with Ukraine, including through the world reading on February 24, and to support literary ties in the Black Sea region. As in previous years, we managed to attract outstanding writers to the guest list. I am looking forward to the start of the event, especially the opening speech by the writer Radu Vanka, who will talk about the importance of literature, especially in times of war. I would like to thank the Jan Michalski Foundation and the partner cultural institutes, especially the Goethe-Institut from Bucharest, the host of the event,” said Ulrich Schreiber, a well-known German cultural manager, co-founder and co-director of Odesa. International literary festival with Hans Rupprecht.

Readings and debates within the framework of the festival will take place in English, Ukrainian and Romanian with translation. Public access to the event is free. The full program of the festival is on the official website: www.litfestodessa.com.

Founded in 2015, the Odesa International Literary Festival aimed to highlight the city’s cultural flourishing and international character, and to promote the strengthening of its ties with other cultural metropolises in Europe and other continents. The program for each individual issue expresses this aspiration both through the selection of guest writers and through the topics of dialogue. The panorama of the cultural space of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region is of particular importance in the architecture of the festival program. Until now, almost 300 writers have participated in the events of the Odesa International Literary Festival. Hans Rupprecht and Ulrich Schreiber have managed the festival since its inception.