And Now? International Congress of the Literary Sector in a Time of Political Upheaval

Maya Dimerli, Odesa, Ukraine:

In Lisbon, Maya Dimerli will present Odesa, a UNESCO City of Literature, and the cooperation with its fellow Cities of Literature within the Creative Cities Network. She will speak about Poems Not Bombs, initiated with Ilya Kaminsky, and Ukrainian Cosmopolis, showing how international cooperation supports children, writers and cultural institutions, and explore future links between Odesa and Lisbon.  

Moderation: Ulrich Schreiber

Ulrich Schreiber, Berlin, Germany:
On the International Literature Festival Odesa, the World Alliance and the Lisbon Literature Days

Ulrich Schreiber will speak about the challenges of organizing the International Literature Festival Odesa, which has taken place outside Ukraine since 2022 due to the war, as well as about the Lisbon Literature Days and the World Alliance, with a particular focus on their future development.

Moderation: Michi Strausfeld

Vanni Bianconi, Bellinzona, Switzerland:
Audenesque. An AI experiment with writing, translating and impersonating.

First-hand experiments and second-hand informed opinions about translating hand in hand with AI: keeping an upper hand or hands-off policies, handovers and handpicks, and what can get out of hand.

Moderation: Ulrich Schreiber

Helge Lunde, Stavanger, Norway:
ICORN: We are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars

30 years after Salman Rushdie first mobilized cities to protect writers at risk: Can writers still speak truth to power – and find protection from censorship and persecution?

Salman Rushdie: ‘A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel cannot diffuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars.’ 

Moderation: Ulrich Schreiber

Ana Gallego Cuiñas, Granada, Spain:

How do literary festivals create literary value? This presentation explores literary festivals as key institutions in today’s literary field, examining their role in shaping aesthetic canons, fostering bibliodiversity, promoting equality and inclusion, and redefining the relationship between literature, cultural policy and sustainability.  Beyond celebrating books, festivals have become powerful spaces for cultural mediation and public responsibility.

“CULTUR-ALH and the challenges currently facing literary festivals in Spain and Latin America”. 

In a context of increasing political and economic uncertainty, literary festivals in Southern Europe and Latin America face new challenges – but also new opportunities. Drawing on the experience of CULTUR-ALH, this presentation argues for festivals as experimental, community-based laboratories that reconnect with the avant-garde while promoting bibliodiversity, local participation and environmental sustainability.  The future may not lie in choosing between global or local festivals, but in creating community-based festivals capable of connecting international conversations with local cultural ecosystems.

Moderation: Michi Strausfeld

Steven J Fowler, London, UK:
The European Poetry Festival

The European Poetry Festival aims to utilise collaboration and performance, and an expansive understanding of poetry – to reach new audiences in the 21st century. This model, in the context of a post-Brexit Britain, aims also to bring together the literary and the avant-garde, the methodologically marginal and the textual-but-not-literary. This talk will also discuss how the challenges of AI are perversely benefitting the experimental and underground in European literature and what that might portend for the future.

Moderation: Peter Florence

Language: English