Europe’s vast range of literary events includes some of the oldest and most venerated in the world. Use the search menu below to find events across the continent.
The Big Book Festival is an international celebration of books and arts. The festival takes place in Warsaw in June with international and Polish guests. The Big Book Festival takes great efforts to create unique and innovative events, using multimedia, scenography, and urban spaces. Literature is put on stage and adapted for performances and spectacles to build excitement for both authors and readers.
The Conrad Festival is an annual literary festival held in June in Kraków since 2009. It is organized by the Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation and the Kraków Festival Office. The festival hosts artists from around the world, representatives of various cultures and worldviews, who create not only literature, but also film, theatre, music and the visual arts.
The Kraków Festival Office is a leading Polish institution which organizes the most important cultural events in Poland and in Europe. Over several days of July, the festival celebrates poetry through meetings with authors, presentations of debut works, concerts, as well as poetry readings and commentaries. Named after the poet Czesław Miłosz, the festival aims to explore and promote the possibilities and the history of poetry.
The Found in Translation Gdańsk Literary Meetings are a unique literary festival dedicated to the art of translation. Eminent writers, translators, and literary critics from Poland and abroad are invited in April to talk about literature and translation. The meetings offer a possibility of looking at literature from a different angle. The meetings have been taking place every two years since 2013.
The Góry Literatury Festival was founded in 2015 on the initiative of Olga Tokarczuk. The writer, who lives near Nowa Ruda, has initiated a unique literary and social event held in July. The event’s main objectives are the cultural and civic revitalization of the population, cultural education, ecology, equal rights, identity and freedom of speech, the cultural heritage of Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland, and national boundaries. The goal is to analyze and discuss sustainable development of the region through cross-cultural cooperation and culture.
The Sopot by the Book Festival is organized by the City of Sopot and the Municipal Public Library in Sopot. Each year in August, the organizers select one country and make its literature the main theme of the festival. The festival presents literature in a variety of forms including readings, film screenings, and workshops. Alongside meetings with authors, there are debates on women’s rights, the Anthropocene, national identities, or the spiritual condition of humankind.
