Literary Fair book festival founded in Kharkiv

Kharkiv will host the newly founded book festival Literary Fair for the first time. The program includes meetings with authors, book presentations and sales, lectures on history and culture, and many more events. The festival is organized by the Serhiy Zhadan Charitable Foundation with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation.

The festival got its name from the Literary Fair magazine, published in Kharkiv in 1928-1930. It featured the first publications of iconic works by Mykola Khvyliovyi, Maik Yohansen, Mykola Kulish, and Ostap Vyshnia.

Over the course of 12 issues, the magazine brought together 74 authors from a wide range of literary groups and movements, and had a playful, colorful, dynamic, and ironic tone that will be carried over into the festival.

PR director of the Literary Fair festival, Olena Pavlova, told Chytomo that the idea for the festival came from Serhiy Zhadan and Oleksandr Krasovytskyi, director of the Folio publishing house.

“This magazine was important, and we want to revive a dialogue with it — a dialogue between eras that was both ironic and contemporary,” Pavlova noted.

The main stage will function as a radio studio, where conversations with writers will take place. Readers will meet Zhadan, Marjana Savka, Andriy Kurkov, Andriy Kokotyukha, Oleksandr Irvanets, Julia Paevska (Taira), Oleksandr Krasovytskyi, Ruslan Horovy, Vakhtang Kipiani, Yulita Ran, Valeria Subotina, Oleksandr Savchuk, Olena Pavlova, and other Ukrainian authors.

Polish reporter and author Wojciech Tochman will visit Kharkiv with the support of the Polish Institute in Kyiv.

“The aim of the festival is to show that despite everyday threats and shelling, Kharkiv remains the heart of Ukrainian publishing. It’s crucial to offer support and to understand the challenges publishers face in these conditions. This is about resilience, about resistance, and a response to an enemy that wants to wipe this all out, targeting printing presses and even shooting at books. We want to underscore just how vital the publishing industry is,” Pavlova said.

Various Kharkiv publishing houses will participate in the fair with Folio, Vivat, Zhorzh, Ranok, Fabula, Oleksandr Savchuk Publishing, KSD, ASSA, and the Unisoft book factory among them, as well as invited publishers from other cities: Meridian Czernowitz, A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA, Nash Format, and The Old Lion Publishing House.

A roundtable featuring publishers who, despite the widespread destruction caused by the war, continue to be leaders in Ukraine’s publishing industry will open the fair. The festival will close with an acoustic performance by the band Zhadan i Sobaky.

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Students of the children’s art studio “Aza Nizi Maza” are preparing a large-scale graphic mural featuring ironic portraits of writers to be displayed at the festival.

“Aza Nizi Maza is creating a book the size of the fair itself for the Literary Fair. At the center of the story are the fair’s guests: poets and prose writers, publishers and cultural activists, historians and storytellers. Some of them will be portrayed having climbed the tree of culture, others reciting poems sitting on the lion, while others are building a wall of books. Amusing situations, on the edge of the grotesque and love. The book will become larger than the reader, and the reader will become part of the book,” the studio’s director Mykola Kolomiiets said.

The booth of the project “Voices of the Land of Poets” will feature audio recordings of poems by Ukrainian artists, performed by the authors themselves. Visitors will have the opportunity to hear the voices of Vasyl Stus, Pavlo Tychyna, Mykola Bazhan, and Maksym Rylsky. Ten classics of Ukrainian literature alongside ten contemporary poets whose voices were cut short by the war. The curator is Olha Olkhova.

The festival will also hold a memorial event for Nika Kozhushko, a Kharkiv poet and artist who died as a result of Russian shelling. August 30 will mark one year since Nika died.

Among the new book releases is the presentation of the feminist poetry anthology “The Second Wreath”, featuring many authors from Kharkiv. Poems will be read by Varvara Chorna, Ivanna Skyba-Yakubova, Natalka Marynchak, Yulia Iliukha, Olena Rybka, Marja Tertsia, Daria Zorina, Lyudmyla Horova, Olya Novak, Maryana Savka, and Olha Olkhova.

The festival will feature a charity drive to collect books and funds for libraries in the Kharkiv oblast that have been affected by Russia’s attacks.

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Images: Festival’s team

Copy editing: Joy Tataryn