“Everything is translation” — focus theme of the 13th International Book Arsenal Festival announced

“Everything is translation” — focus theme of the 13th International Book Arsenal Festival — is announced; festival to be curated by Marci Shore and Oksana Forostyna. The festival will run between May 29 and June 1, 2025.

“Everything is translation”  is both the focus theme and the main metaphor of the 13th Book Arsenal Festival, as the curators reveal in their curatorial essay.

“[W]hat do the numerous untranslatables tell us—words that exist in one language but are absent in another? Are then slightly different realities meant, from language to language, from society to society? And what if the experiences of these societies differ radically? Can language reliably convey the experience of one to another? … The answer is in the curators’ conversation, but to find it, you need to read the conversation to the end,” Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, the Director General of Mystetskyi Arsenal, wrote in an introduction to the essay.

The main program will be curated by a journalist, host, translator, literary critic and producer of Radio Kultura, Iryna Slavinska.

“I fear an enormous amount of human suffering is left silent for eternity. And given this, we should all the more so appreciate what language can do, however imperfectly, and appreciate those who attempt to translate moments at the very border of human experience into words … We will never understand anyone else’s experience perfectly, all the more so in situations of extremity. That said, the act of translating–of translating our own experiences into language, and of translating someone else’s experiences from one language into another–is a leap of faith that some kind of understanding is possible,” Marci Shore, the co-curator of the Focus Theme of the 13th Book Arsenal, said.

The Book Arsenal festival will host the Kids and Teens Program, and will be curated by writer, journalist, translator and author of books for kids and teens Olya Rusina. A special program for teenagers will also be presented by the participants of the Literary Laboratory for Teenagers.

Manager of cultural and educational projects, editor and literary scholar Yuliia Konopliana will be the curator of the Professional Program this year.

Translatorium Literary and Translation Festival will host a special program, curated by co-founder and director of the festival Tania Rodionova.

Under the supervision of Oksana Karpiuk, the Book Arsenal Fellowship Program will be held for the second time, providing a platform for industry discussions, exchange of experience, meetings and acquaintance of foreign publishers, rights managers and literary agents with the Ukrainian book market.

PEN Ukraine will present its special program at this year’s Book Arsenal for the third time. Publishers will also have events in the festival program.

Learn more about events at the 13th International Book Arsenal Festival.

Marci Shore is a professor of history at Yale University. She will begin teaching at the University of Toronto’s Munk School in fall 2025. Shore is also a regular visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.

Oksana Forostyna is opinion editor at Ukraina Moderna and a publisher, translator and author. Forostyna is a contributor to Liberties, The European Review of Books, Krytyka, Dwutygodnik, and Visegrad Insight.

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Copy editing: Joy Tataryn