Book Arsenal Festival announced the dates for 2023

Mystetskyi Arsenal team announced the 11th International Book Arsenal Festival in 2023.

The festival will run from June 22 (official opening in the evening) to June 25.

“Over the past year, our team has done a lot of important things abroad: The Book Arsenal was present at various major book fairs and festivals around the world with its program events and special projects, including professional ones,” Yuliia Kozlovets, Director of the International Book Arsenal Festival, told Chytomo. “But we all really missed our real festival.”

The organizers of the event noted that the core structure of the Book Arsenal remains unchanged for the visitors and will consist of two elements: the event program of the festival, and the book fair with respective thematic sections.

The Book Arsenal will be held in the left wing of the first floor of the Old Arsenal.

“We feel, share and fully understand this request for cultural events from our visitors, people who live and work in Ukraine today: we all need to get together, feel ourselves among our own, discuss important issues, share experiences,” added Yuliia Kozlovets. “We need the Book Arsenal in Kyiv!”

This year, the book fair will be organized in a different way: due to the very unequal working conditions of the publishing market representatives because of the war, the impossibility of organizing their equal representation with individual stands, and the riskiness in terms of safety and security, the book sales at the festival will be operated not by separate publishing houses, but by local Kyiv bookstores:

• Sens bookstore will manage the Nonfiction section,
• Book Lion bookstore will manage the Fiction section,
• Zakapelok bookstore will manage the Children’s Books, as well as Comics and Graphic Novels sections.

In addition, the Dovzhenko Centre will be the operator of the Art Book section as part of its interinstitutional partnership with the Mystetskyi Arsenal. The Book Arsenal pays special attention to the War Literature section. A selection of books created by war veterans, combatants, and members of their families — books about war published after 2014 — will be presented at the fair.

“We will do everything to make it happen. Not as large as before, differently organized, with a very focused program, but it will bring us all together in the Old Arsenal galleries, and that’s the main thing,” summarized Yuliia Kozlovets.

More information about the focus theme, curators, and the event program will be available soon on the Book Arsenal website.

The International Book Arsenal Festival (IBAF) is an annual event organized by the Mystetskyi Arsenal since 2011. It takes place annually in Kyiv, Ukraine. During this decade it has become one of the most influential literary and art events in Eastern Europe.

Read also: Mom, I see war – the slogan of the Ukrainian stand at the Bologna Book Fair

Source: Book Arsenal