The International Book Arsenal Festival and the all-Ukrainian non-governmental organization Ukrainian Library Association invite libraries to join the joint project Book Arsenal in Your Library. As part of the project, local libraries will be able to join the online program of the 10th International Book Arsenal Festival that will take place in a hybrid format on June 23-27.

The Book Arsenal in Your Library project will allow residents of local communities from different parts of Ukraine and the world to visit the Festival online and join in viewing and discussing the events that will take place during the Festival in Kyiv.

The library will be a platform for library workers and visitors to discuss and be inspired by new ideas in the international and local context. Following the experience of Book Arsenal, the project participants will be able to create their own events on the basis of local libraries.

YOU CAN JOIN IF YOUR LIBRARY:

1. is large or small, public, under school or university authorities; has the experience of successful events or is just looking for ways to establish relations with a community; is located in a city or village, in Ukraine or abroad;
2. is interested in super-relevant intellectual online content from the best literary festival in the world.

ALL IT TAKES IS:

• to fill out the application form at the link by May 31 and receive a participant package with the detailed program of online events and the set of layouts for your own information campaign;
• to study the program of events offered by Book Arsenal, and to create your own program on its basis, which will be interesting to your community. Your own program may include discussions, meetings with local authors and publishers, presentations of local lore books, etc;
• to arrange a location creatively and technically, taking into account safety standards, in order to hold the program events in your library;
• to design, using layouts, your own posters, flyers and ads, create an event in the social media profile of your library, conduct an advertising campaign among your potential audience and invite them to the library for the program events;
• from June 23 to June 27, 2021 (and later): to celebrate the Festival to its full extent by your own schedule and plan, and to share impressions and photos from events on social networks, using the hashtag #bookarsenal_lib;
• to summarize and report by July 10, 2021 on how everything went, what worked best and how to improve the project next year.

By July 24, 2021, the Organizing Committee for the Project will choose the most active participating libraries that will receive prizes from the Book Arsenal Festival.

JOIN AND CREATE AN INTELLECTUAL CULTURAL CENTER IN YOUR COMMUNITY!

The call for applications for participation in the exhibition fair and the event program of the International Book Arsenal has been launched. The annual 10th Festival will take place on May 26-30, 2021

Due to quarantine restrictions, this year the Festival will be held in a hybrid format. However, the Mystetskyi Arsenal team understands the value of live contact between literature and its readers, so the fair and event parts are not to be cancelled in the Arsenal space.

Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, the Mystetskyi Arsenal Director, tells how exactly the Festival will change due to the pandemic threats:

The safety of visitors and participants of the International Book Arsenal Festival has always been and will remain our priority. Therefore, this year the fair and the event part will have fewer participants. We will focus on making the Arsenal space safe for everyone. For example, we are developing the system of visiting the Festival by booking time slots to prevent crowds. This year, which is still very hard, Book Arsenal will not be as noisy and crowded as usual, but it will allow publishers, readers and writers to meet each other. To do this, we need all our participants to help us: we ask that safety be given priority, while remembering that this crisis will eventually end and that our incredible Book Arsenal will sooner or later become as crowded and free from restrictions as ever.

Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta

The Organizing Committee invites publishers, illustrators and different cultural institutions to apply for participation with their own expositional stands, as well as propose ideas to the event offline and online program. Yuliia Kozlovets, the Festival Coordinator, tells what are the advantages of the new hybrid format of Book Arsenal:

This year, our main task is to use all the benefits of online formats and thus attract people from all over the globe to the Festival. To do this, we are creating a new Book Arsenal website with simple and user-friendly navigation for both participants and visitors, with additional opportunities for publishers. Together with you, we will create a program of undoubtedly bright and interactive online and live events. We are preparing a great Professional Program for publishers, agents, literary managers with a focus on international cooperation. Book Arsenal will traditionally have an effective promotional campaign, the goal of which this year is to gather at least 50,000 visitors both in the Arsenal space and online. The traditional visual component of the Festival together with the unique space of the Old Arsenal will be presented in online programming as well.

Yuliia Kozlovets
© Oleksandr Popenko

Please find the updated Terms of Participation in the Book Arsenal Festival here.
For registration, please fill out the online forms — fair and events program.
Applications for participation in the exhibition fair are accepted until February 12, 2021.
Applications for the program of events are accepted until February 17, 2021.

It is worth noting that approval of applicants for participating in the exhibition fair is based on the mechanism of expert selection aimed to efficiently use Mystetskyi Arsenal’s limited space for presenting at the Festival a wide variety of publishers whose work is recognized as high quality. At the same time, the Festival supports new independent actors promoting quality competition on the market.

The Organizing Committee will notify the applicants on the selection results in early March 2021 by email.

This year, the Festival’s focus theme is OPTIMISTS SKEPTICS curated by literary critic Rostyslav Semkiv.

Book Arsenal is an international event that annually gathers more than 100 foreign guests, more than 200 publishers and cultural institutions, more than 55,000 visitors. The International Book Arsenal Festival was founded by Mystetskyi Arsenal in 2011 and is an annual intellectual event in Ukraine, where the book, literary, visual, musical, and theatrical scenes develop and interact.