Festival honours poets and winegrowers
Ptuj, 21 August - For nearly a whole week Slovenia's oldest town, Ptuj, will be hosting the 27th Days of Poetry and Wine. Starting today, the festival will feature 18 poets from ten countries as well as selected winemakers. Events will be held in several other towns as well.
Ptuj
Press conference to present the 27th Days of Poetry and Wine.
Photo: Andreja Seršen Dobaj/STA
Organised by the publisher Beletrina, the international festival is considered one of the most prominent in the region.
Poet Kristina Kočan, who in the past year replaced Aleš Šteger as the programme director, said at a recent press conference that guest poets on this year's programme are different from each other age-wise, culturally, socially and politically, and their poetics are very diverse.
The guests of honour will be Lithuanian poet Eugenijus Ališanka and Swiss poet Ilma Rakusa. Their works have been translated into many languages.
Born to a Slovenian father and a Hungarian mother, Rakusa is known not only for her poems but also for her short stories, essays and literary translations. In 2009, her novel Mehr Meer (More of the Sea) received the Swiss Book Prize.
Ališanka, also an essayist and translator, has created "a literary landscape that is clearly rooted in Lithuania yet also connects to the shared European literary canon and history", reads the Poetry International website.
In keeping with its annual tradition, the festival will unveil the Open Letter to Europe, which will this year be written by English poet David Harsent, whose poetry collection Fire Songs won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize in 2014.
The letter is the festival's initiative to use a poetic voice to reach out to audiences across Europe and to decision-makers. Harsent's letter will focus on the current environmental crisis.
The letter will be presented at the official opening of the festival in Ptuj on Thursday, before Harsent himself reads it out loud in an online conversation at the festival on Friday.
Other guest writers, selected by Galician literary critic and poet Yolanda Castano, will include Joumana Haddad from Lebanon, Luljeta Lleshanaku from Albania, Frank Baez from the Dominican Republic, Lello Voce from Italy and Miriam Drev from Slovenia.
The Slovenian author in focus is France Forstnerič (1933-2007), who left an indelible mark on the Slovenian literary landscape, but whose work might have been overlooked, and so the organisers would like to honour him on the 90th anniversary of his birth.
The festival will include evening poetry readings and a number of other events for different age groups. On top of Ptuj the events will be held in a number of other towns, including Ljubljana, Krško, Ljutomer, Laafeld in Austria and Varaždin in Croatia.