This year, the 12th International Book Arsenal Festival will be held from May 30 (the evening of the official opening) to June 2. The festival will consist of the program component and the book fair, which will take place on the first floor of the Old Arsenal building.
Both separate publishing houses and bookstores are invited to be sales operators of books that will present books in the sections Art Books, Fiction, Non-fiction, Books in English, Comics and Graphic.
Of course the focus of Book Arsenal will be on the books about the war published after 2014, the editions produced by war veterans, members of their families. In addition to the fair at the publishers’ stands, they will be presented separately in the space New Titles.
Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko are chosen as the curators of the focus theme of the 12th International Book Arsenal Festival, which will be held on May 30-June 2.
Life on the Edge is the focus theme and the main metaphor of the 12th Book Arsenal, that the curators develop in their essay.
Olena Huseinova, a radio presenter, radio producer, writer, has become the curator of the Literature Program of Book Arsenal 2024.
During Book Arsenal, the Kids and Teens Program will also take place. Its work will be curated by Olha Rusina, a writer, journalist, translator, author of books for kids and teenagers.
The 12th Book Arsenal will host the Literary Festival The Fifth Kharkiv with a special program. This program will be organized in collaboration with the Kharkiv Literary Museum. The program will be curated by Yevhenii Stasinevych, a literary critic, literary scholar, lecturer, curator of art projects.
At this year’s Book Arsenal, PEN Ukraine will present a special program of events for the second time.
Oksana Karpiuk will curate the Professional Program, which will become a platform for industry discussions, exchange of experience and search for successful solutions.
Separate events from publishers will also be presented at Book Arsenal.
This project is supported by Partnership Fund for Resilient Ukraine (PFRU), funded by aid from the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.
Book Arsenal – 2024 is also held with the financial support of the Ministry of State for Culture and the Media of Germany within the project Exchange between German and Ukrainian Literary and Book Sectors.
The project aims at supporting the activities of Ukrainian authors, publishers and media professionals through a series of individual projects, as well as at developing a base of knowledge and understanding of Ukrainian culture and history in Germany. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association is responsible for the implementation of the project in close cooperation with such institutions as the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Ukrainian Book Institute, the National Art and Culture Museum Complex “Mystetskyi Arsenal”, the professional media about books and culture Chytomo and the Goethe Institute Ukraine.
Book Arsenal is an international event organized by the Mystetskyi Arsenal. The festival has been held since 2011, and has become one of the most influential literary and artistic events in Eastern Europe. In 2019, it won The Literary Festival Award of the International Excellence Awards. The mission of the International Book Arsenal Festival is to create such interactions between people, communities, institutions when the combination of aesthetic experience and intellectual inclusion in the context of a book strengthens the capacity of a person and society.