The 27th Vilenica International Literary Festival runs from September 5 to 9 throughout Slovenia, primarily in the region bordering Italy. “Nomadic writers” is a thematic focus at this year’s festival, with a selection of guests who amply illustrate this tendency.
Bekim Sejranović is a writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina who lives in Oslo, Dimitré Dinev is a Bulgarian in Vienna, Zineb El Rhazoui is a Moroccan refugee currently in Ljubljana, while Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet resident in the US. Last year’s Ingeborg Bachmann Prize-winner Maja Haderlap, a bilingual Carinthian-Slovene author, will also be involved in these cross-cultural discussions.
Another nomadic writer will be acknowledged when the Vilenica Prize is awarded to Canadian-based Serbian writer David Albahari. The prize is awarded in a ceremony in the Vilenica Cave.
The festival has a number of other programs and events in collaboration with the Slovene Writers’ Association and the Central European Initiative. There will be a reading by last year’s Writer in Residence Montenegrin Ognjen Spahić. Spahić’s novel Hansen’s Children was published in an English translation by Istros Books in 2011.
The festival is also putting out an anthology of Hebrew literature called This is not a Fairytale that includes the work of A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, David Grossman among many other writers.
Photo – Celtic temple threshold stone at Štanjel, in the community Komen, Kras, Slovenia by Johann Jaritz/wikimedia
literalab 
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[…] was previously noted, Canadian-Jewish-Serbian writer David Albahari won the Vilenica Prize in Slovenia. In his […]