14th International Book Arsenal Festival has announced its program

The program for the 14th International Book Arsenal Festival, which will open on May 28 and continue through May 31 at Mystetskyi Arsenal, has been released on the festival’s official website.

This year’s festival will include 240 events, among them discussions, lectures, readings, workshops, and meetings with authors, as well as musical and performance programs. More than 150 participants are expected to join the book fair. The focus theme of the 14th festival is “Bear Your Freedom.”

The fair itself will bring together both major and independent publishers, the book.ua bookstore, partner stands, and military and volunteer initiatives. The artistic program of the festival will also include 15 exhibition projects.

This year, the focus theme is curated by Maksym Butkevych — a Ukrainian journalist, human rights advocate, serviceman, and former prisoner of war.

The festival will also see the return of the Writer’s Program, curated by Andriy Lyubka, a serviceman in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, volunteer, poet, novelist, and translator. According to the curator, the program will encourage visitors to reflect on the idea of neighbors.

“This winter, nature has healed so much that the easiest way to describe grand geopolitics now is to provide the example of a frostbitten apartment in a high-rise building in Kyiv.

“The enemy (cold) attacks from outside, resources are limited ― there is no electricity or heating, and the water in the pipes may freeze by morning. This ordeal, which hundreds of thousands of residents of Kyiv, Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, and other cities had to endure last winter, very clearly highlighted the need and efficiency of cooperation and mutual support.

“As practice showed, problems were solved more quickly in those buildings where housing cooperatives worked, where good and trusting relations prevailed between neighbors, where a problem was solved jointly rather than individually,” said Lyubka.

Separate curated sections were also announced, including the Main Program, the Professional Program, and the Children’s Program, titled “The Courage of the First Try.”

Among the guests taking part in the festival are Olga Tokarczuk, who will appear in a public conversation with Lyubka on the main stage, and Peter Pomerantsev, who is set to participate in the discussion “The Fog of War: Where Truth Ends and Control Begins.”

The full event program will be available on the website soon.

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Main image: Book Arsenal website

Copyediting: Joy Tataryn