“A Year of the Hunter” – we present guests of Miłosz Festival 2018

Meetings with authors, poems reading, discussions and debates – on 7-10 June Krakow, for the seventh time, will become the world capital of poetry. Miłosz Festival 2018 will be an opportunity to meet prominent Polish authors, such as Marek Krystian Emanuel Baczewski, Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar, Marcin Baran and Urszula Kozioł, as well as foreign guests, including Jane Hirshfield and Ron Padgett (USA), Eugenijus Ališanka (Lithuania), Katja Gorečan (Slovenia), Stepanova (Russia) and Olvido García Valdés (Spain). Artistic director of the festival is poet and literary critic Krzysztof Siwczyk.

“A year of the hunter is the motto of the upcoming Miłosz Festival edition in Krakow. A Year of the Hunter by Czesław Miłosz is a unique diary presenting one year of a mature poet’s life and providing a model of world perception that is topical today. We experience a radically fragmentary reality. The world seems perceptible only for a fleeting moment of the present, amid a growing sense of threat we feel. We strive to build our identity in close contact with reality that keeps slipping away from us. In fact we do not know if reality is a projection of our fears and imagination or if it contains a solid core of sense that we can discover through literature” – says Krzysztof Siwczyk, artistic director of the festival.

Painting portraits of his opponents (but also his fellows) in A Year of the Hunter, Czesław Miłosz presents a polyphony of clashing ideas and literary aesthetics. In so doing, he does not forgo voicing his sometimes staunch and controversial views. A fluctuating amplitude of dispute concerning literature, ethics, social matters, stance on one’s homeland, habitable zone or metaphysics enables us to recognise the character of times we live in. The language of the dispute is at stake.

“Poetry is a starting point for discussion because it opens our eyes and sharpens our attention to the various ways of describing the world we happen to share. Poetry can also become the ending point, providing a unique chance for us to reach agreement or at least find a common ground among this multitude of languages, systems of values and beliefs” – says Olga Brzezińska, president of the City of Literature Foundation and programme director of the festival organised together with the Krakow Festival Office.

In every act of reading or writing we hunt the world that invariably slips away. Every day we experience the dread of role-shifting in this hunt. Sometimes we are game, when ideological input reduces the complex picture of reality to simple, existential recipes, depriving us of the right to complexity in our attitudes and choices. We become hunters when we try to implant our world perception in others, disregarding dialogue and respect for the otherness of somebody’s language and values expressed in that language. There is one thing that unites us: we all play a game of fickle rules, in which the stake is either co-existence amid differences or a blind violence of institutionally declared truths.

“The Miłosz Festival is a meeting of various poetic privacies and outstanding literary individualities” says Izabela Helbin, director of the Krakow Festival Office, “Crowds of readers come to Krakow to meet highly esteemed writers. It will be likewise this year, and the presence of authors from numerous countries will make Krakow a place where poetry is discussed in various languages.”

Eminent poets will be visiting Krakow, representing six languages and as many different visions of literature. Guests from abroad will include: Jane Hirshfield and Ron Padgett from the USA, Eugenijus Ališanka from Lithuania, Katja Gorečan from Slovenia, Maria Stepanova  from Russia and Olvido García Valdés from Spain. Their multi-voice narrative will be enhanced by Polish poets: Marek Baczewski, Marcin Baran, Tomasz Bąk, Jerzy Jarniewicz, Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar, Urszula Kozioł, Joanna Oparek, Andrzej Szuba and Ilona Witkowska. We hope that, as every year, the Miłosz Festival will become a splendid celebration of poetry covering different traditions, a time for meeting and conversation about literature, ideas and the world. We also believe it will be a time of multi-voice narrative rather than a rhetoric of exclusion and political stigmatisation.

MEET THE GUESTS OF MIŁOSZ FESTIVAL 2018

The course of the festival will also be set by remarkable graphics, in which ubiquitous red and black dots refer to the rhythm of days throughout the year. The author of this concept, Tomek Budzyń, explains: “There are 365 dots like days in a calendar, some overlap, some elongate and others seem to elude our understanding of order. Their strong colours refer to conflicting world views but also remain in a constant dialogue.”

Organisers of the festival are: the City of Krakow, Krakow Festival Office and the City of Literature Foundation.

More information on the festival and the upcoming events soon to be found at: www.miloszfestival.pl

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage

To mark this year’s World Poetry Day, Krakow UNESCO City of Literature and our colleagues across the globe are linking up to hold simultaneous literary events in 13 UNESCO Cities of Literature.

Celebrated yearly on March 21^st, World Poetry Day is the occasion to honour poets and celebrate one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression. Practiced throughout history – in every culture and on every continent – poetry speaks to our common humanity and our shared values, transforming the simplest of poems into a powerful catalyst for intercultural dialogue and peace. It is an art form that, more than any other, demonstrates the transformative power of words.

The following flagship events celebrating the breadth and diversity of the UNESCO Cities’ poets are taking place across the world on 21 March:

• A long-range poetry recital led by 60 poets in 24 libraries in the city of Granada involving poets from Nottingham and Ljubljana, Georgina Wilding and Anja Golob respectively. Goodwill Ambassador for UNESCO Creative Cities, Italian poet Maria Francesca Merloni, will attend the event.
• Heidelberg have displayed 45 poems written by 22 poets inside public trams. A special poetic tramwill travel across the city with regular stops, while every 10 minutes another poet will make the ride a poetic journey, reciting poetry to passengers.
• Similarly, in Tartu, audiences will be taken on a Poetry Route movement across the city with 15 poetry performances taking place in 7 locations. Additional readings involving poets and high school students will be performed throughout the day.
• A wealth of poetry activities will take place in Krakow including a walking Poetry Song Trail, a multi-poetry presentation of new poems projected on the façade of a building on Bracka St, and the programme announcement of this year’s Milosz Poetry Festival.
• Heidelberg House in Heidelberg’s French twin city Montpellier will present a poetic evening of German poetry and its impact on today’s French poetic artworks.
• Barcelona will host a visual poetry workshop and events with Maria Isern and Guillem Gavaldà, prize-winners of the Francesc Garriga Poetry Prize.
• Poetry events and artistic performances are taking place in Iowa City and Prague.
• Reykjavik will feature a Children’s Poetry Morning, a Poetic Lunch Hour and finish with a Poetry Happening in the HÓLAVALLAGARÐUR CEMETARY. 

A number of poetry live-stream and television broadcasts will take place in

• Obidos at the medieval gate of the town, by local poet Armando da Silva Carvalho.
• Edinburgh with local poets writing throughout the day and literary podcasts shared on the hour, each one with a different theme and international audience from Edinburgh City of Literature’s Facebook and Twitter channels.
• Bookshops, coffee shops and the main cultural streets of Baghdad.
• Krakow a Facebook Live tour of bookstores by a Krakow-based poet.

Preceding World Poetry Day on 19^th March, Dublin will be hosting a Poetry and Spoken Word Trail where audiences will enjoy exceptional performances from an array of emerging and established poets

This World Poetry Day, follow the social conversation using #WPD2018 and #CitiesofLitPoetry and experience creative and poetic moments in a City of Literature near you.

MORE INFORMATION

UNESCO’s City of Literature programme is part of a wider Creative Cities Network that was launched in 2004 and is currently made up of 180 UNESCO Creative Cities globally. As of 2017, the UNESCO Cities of Literature network of 28 cities represents 6 continents and 23 countries, and a combined population of over 26 million, 1250 libraries, 130 literary festivals and over 1200 bookshops. The Network is active in making the literary and creative sectors of cities thrive through the development and implementation of a shared global strategy, which aims to promote the network, share good practice, and ensure that literature reaches diverse audiences.

About World Poetry Day: World Poetry Day is on 21 March, and was first declared by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999, with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard.

Kholoud Charaf, Syrian poet and art critic, as well as a social activist looking for better opportunities for women and children who survived the war became a scholarship holder of the City of Krakow as part of the ICORN program – the International Cities of Refuge Network. The organizers of her residency are the City of Krakow, the Krakow Festival Office and the Villa Decius Association.

Kholoud Charaf comes from Al Mjemr in the south of Syria. In 2003, she graduated from the University of Damascus and obtained a diploma as a medical technician. In  2013-2015 she worked as the head of the medical unit at the women’s ward in the central Suwayda prison. For almost a year, she also worked as an English teacher at the Syrian Children’s Education Institute, with children who had no chance of formal education due to the ongoing war in this country. She also participated in the psychological support course organized by Syrian Red Cross in 2013.

As a poet, Charaf has published one volume entitled The Remains of the Butterfly, published by Takween Publishing House in 2016. Th originality of literary images and metaphors and the author’s ability to transform the difficult events of war into beautiful, imaginary worlds generated from memories was well-appreciated by critics.

Currently Charaf is working on her second collection of poetry, which will be titled As If I was Born to Escape the War and a book documenting the atrocities of war in southern Syria. As an art critic, Charaf wrote many reviews of contemporary art exhibitions by Syrian and Arab artists.

Krakow – City of Literature, City of Refuge

Krakow joined ICORN in 2011 (the Miłosz Year) and was the first member of this network from Central and Eastern Europe. The ICORN network, offering shelter to writers and human rights defenders who, due to persecution, cannot live and create freely in their own country, was founded in 2005 in Norway.

ICORN is an ever-growing network of nearly 70 cities, and its activity is based on the defense of freedoms of speech, opinion and expression and international solidarity. During its 10 years of operation,  the ICORN network has provided temporary shelter for several hundred writers, intellectuals, bloggers and human rights activists. The network also works with national governments and many organizations around the world.

International cooperation within the ICORN network occupies a strategic position in the Krakow UNESCO City of Literature program and its development strategy covering 10 thematic areas, including promoting the connection between literature and human rights.