The 28th Vilenica International Literary Festival, organized by the Slovene Writers’ Associationand the Vilenica Cultural Society in Sežana, will once again be presenting the best authors and literature from Central Europe as well as from the rest of Europe and the world. The festival week will begin with the pre-opening events on Tuesday evening, September 10, and will officially take place between September 11 and 15.Standing out among this year’s guests is Olga Tokarczuk who also attended Vilenica in 1997 and 2006, and will be honoured at this year’s festival as the Vilenica Prize winner. She is the sixth female winner of the Vilenica Prize, joining the ranks of Ilma Rakusa (2005), Brigitte Kronauer (2004), Ana Blandiana (2002), Erica Pedretti (1999), and Libuše Monikova (1993).Occupying a special place on the Vilenica map in 2013 is the Slovenian seaside town of Koper, which during the week of the festival will be home to more than fourrty authors from more than twenty different countries, and will offer an array of events on its lovely squares. Regular and supplemental programme events will take place once again in Bilje, Trieste,Ljubljana, Celje, Maribor, Sežana, Šempeter pri Gorici, Divača, Duino and Štanjel, while the Vilenica Prize will be presented according to tradition in the Vilenica Cave.In 2012, Vilenica began a new thematic series entitled Crossroads of European Literature. This is also the name of a two-year collaborative project within the frame of the Culture Programme 2007–2013 in which Vilenica is active along with its partners from Ireland and Italy. As part of this project, we will be hosting three authors-in-residence in Ljubljana, Kranj, Bled, and Beli Križ during the month of August and September.
The theme of this year’s Vilenica Festival is the Inspiration of Borders. Swiss authors Erica Pedretti and Raphael Urweider appeared at the presentation of the Antologija sodobne švicarske književosti
[The Anthology of Contemporary Swiss Literature] in May 2013. During the festival itself Ilma Rakusa, Arno Camenisch, Lukas Bärfuss, Michel Layaz in Pietro De Marchi will give presentations revealing how literature functions in the political context of quadrilinguilism, and what are the connections between Swiss literature and the larger spaces of German, French, and Italian literatures.
This theme also raises questions about the situation of Slovenian literature that emerges in the regions in Italy and Austria beyond Slovenia’s borders. In this context, Vilenica will present the author Florjan Lipuš, from Austrian Carinthia, whose novel Poizvedovanje za imenom [Inquiry after a Name] was recently published by the Litera publishing house. In addition, the American Dalkey Archive Press will be publishing the translation by Michael Biggins of Lipuš’s previous novelZmote dijaka Tjaža. The 28th Vilenica Festival will also have close links to writers in the Slovenian border region of Italy. One of Vilenica’s preview evenings will take place in Trieste, and there will be an evening event at Duino Castle where special attention will be paid to Boris Pahor and Ludwig Hartinger, Vilenica Honorary Guests 2013.
The theme of this year’s Vilenica Festival has also provided inspiration for a debate that will take place during the Central European Initiative round table while the question of interdisciplinary collaboration between literature, film, video, and other forms of interactive dynamic images will be addressed at the 11th International Comparative Literature Colloquium.