The European Poet of Freedom Literature Festival #7 will be held on 9–11 June in Gdańsk. It will be attended by guests from Poland and abroad, including poets and translators shortlisted for the European Poet of Freedom Award.
The shortlisted poets – and their translators – are: Anja Golob (Slovenia) with Marlena Gruda and Miłosz Biedrzycki, Kateryna Kalytko (Ukraine) with Aneta Kamińska, Marianna Kiyanovska (Ukraine) with Adam Pomorski, Luljeta Lleshanku (Albania) with Dorota Horodyska, and Petr Hruška (Czechia) with Dorota Dobrew and Franciszek Nasturczyk.
The winner will be selected by a jury composed of: Krzysztof Czyżewski (chairman), Anna Czekanowicz, Paweł Huelle, Zbigniew Mikołejko, Stanisław Rosiek, Anda Rottenberg, Beata Stasińska and Olga Tokarczuk. The jury’s secretary is Andrzej Jagodziński. The award for the best poetry volume goes to the author and his or her translator(s).
Work on the festival programme and accompanying events is underway. Its authors are Marta Dziewańska, Weronika Janeczko and Barbara Klicka. This year’s edition brings a significant change – the festival will be held in June, which opens new possibilities of interaction with urban space. Moreover, the festival format will be expanded to include visual artists. Apart from meet-the-author events, the programme will include panel discussions, a poetic bazaar, lectures, night reading sessions, music events, workshops for the younger audience and the award ceremony. More details will be available soon.
One of permanent features of the festival is presenting the work of EPF Award finalists to the Polish audience. The five books of poetry published by the City Culture Institute that will be promoted during the festival are:
Luljeta Lleshanaku, Water and Coal, translated into Polish by Dorota Horodyska
Petr Hruška, We Wanted to Save Ourselves. Selected Poems, translated into Polish by Dorota Dobrew and Franciszek Nasturczyk
Anja Golob, Stage Directions to Breathing, translated into Polish by Marlena Gruda and Miłosz Biedrzycki
Kateryna Kalytko, Nobody Knows Us Here and We Know Nobody, translated into Polish by Aneta Kamińska
Marianna Kiyanovska, The Voices of Babyn Yar, translated into Polish by Adam Pomorski
The programme of this year’s edition of the Festival will be prepared by:
Barbara Klicka is the author of four poetry volumes, the novel Zdrój (Well), and the performance poem Elementarz (Primer), directed by Piotr Cieplak for the National Theatre in Warsaw. She received the Silesius Wrocław Poetry Award and Gdynia Literary Award for her book of poetry “nice”.
Weronika Janeczko is an associate of the KONTENT Literary Quarterly, as part of which she works with Krakow UNESCO City of Literature Foundation and literary festivals, such as Miłosz Festival or Silesius. Her works have been published in biblioteka, Wakat, Gazeta Wyborcza, Mały Format and Wizje. Janeczko is a psychologist by profession, currently training to become a psychotherapist. She is doing a PhD at the Jagiellonian University as part of CogNeS programme.
Marta Dziewańska is a curator at Kunstmuseum Bern. Between 2007 and 2018, she was the director of research at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. She curated or co-curated several exhibitions, including: Tools for Utopia. Selected Works from the Daros Latinamerica Collection (Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020), Things Fall Apart. Swiss Art from Boecklin to Valloton (Kunstmuseum Bern, 2019/2020), The Other Trans-Atlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s–1970s (Museum on the Vistula in Warsaw and Sesc Sao Paulo, Brazil 2017/2018), MIRIAM CAHN: I AS HUMAN (Kunstmuseum Bern, Haus der Kunst Munich, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2019).