October 4, 2020 - The European Short Story Festival will be held in Rijeka from October 4 to 9, 2020.
The world’s most renowned writers will meet their audience for public readings, book presentations, discussions, lectures, and literary workshops. Writers from all over the world will be there not only to present their works of art, but also to show off their football skills.
The festival itself is being organised in collaboration with the British Hay Festival, a literary festival of great significance and value. The topic of this year’s festival is Luka različitosti. The word “luka” in Croatian means a town or city with a harbour where ships load or unload and “različitost” means diversity. The syntagma was metaphorically and symbolically used in the festival’s name to indicate that the harbour Rijeka, as the chosen location, represents a place of encounters, exchanges, meetings and dialogues. Diversity represents wealth, possibility and freedom.
Besides the literary events, the Festival includes some programmes like a football match between writers and artists from the region. The programme Vozim ti priču connects artists and taxi drivers from Rijeka and the programme Irska u Rijeci represents the literary and artistic scene of Ireland. The Irish city Galway won the title of the “European Capital of Culture” together with Rijeka. The festival will devote special attention to the youth with the programme Pisci i klinci, where high school students will be given the opportunity to spend some quality time with writers.
On top of everything, there is a special programme from October 6 to 9, devoted to the worldwide famous festival, the Hay Festival. The Hay Festival was founded in 1987 and since then it has been held in more than thirty countries on five continents. The Hay Festival is represented in Rijeka through the anthology “Hay Festival Europa28: Vizije budućnosti”. The anthology “Vizije budućnosti” gathers 28 female authors, writers, artists and scientists. Each represents a member country of the European Union. On this occasion the Danish writer Janne Teller will arrive in Rijeka among many other artists like the Bulgarian travel writer Kapka Kassabova, the Croatian poet Asja Bakić, the Irish actress Lisa Dwan and the Slovene sociologist Renata Salecl.
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