Focus Theme and Curators of the 13th Book Arsenal

Everything Is Translation is the focus theme of the 13th International Book Arsenal Festival, which will be held on May 29-June 1 at the Mystetskyi Arsenal.

The Focus theme is curated by Marci Shore—

Professor of History at Yale University; she will begin teaching at the University of Toronto’s Munk School in fall 2025. Marci is also a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna.

She is the author of the books Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 and The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her third book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, was published in March 2024,

and Oksana Forostyna—

Opinion Editor at Ukraina Moderna, publisher, translator and author. A contributor to Liberties, The European Review of Books, Krytyka, Dwutygodnik, and Visegrad Insight.

She is on the supervisory board for the Cultural Strategy Institute (Lviv), in 2016-2018 she served on the board of Eurozine magazine editorial board (Vienna), one of the expert boards of the International Renaissance Foundation (2021-2022).

The metaphor Everything Is Translation is revealed by Marci Shore and Oksana Forostyna in the curatorial essay which is also a dialog between them. This conversation lasted throughout the summer and fall of 2024. The outcome was recorded at the end of that year which we will now call the last year before the great geopolitical shifts that are changing the international order established after World War II.

What do the numerous untranslatables tell us—words that exist in one language but are absent in another? Are then slightly different realities meant, from language to language, from society to society? And what if the experiences of these societies differ radically? Can language reliably convey the experience of one to another? … The answer is in the curators’ conversation, but to find it, you need to read the conversation to the end

—Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, the Director General of the Mystetskyi Arsenal.

I fear an enormous amount of human suffering is left silent for eternity. And given this, we should all the more so appreciate what language can do, however, imperfectly, and appreciate those who attempt to translate moments at the very border of human experience into words. We will never understand anyone else’s experience perfectly, all the more so in situations of extremity. That said, the act of translating–of translating our own experiences into language, and of translating someone else’s experiences from one language into another–is a leap of faith that some kind of understanding is possible

—Marci Shore, the co-curator of the Focus Theme of the 13th Book Arsenal.

This year, the Main Program of the Festival will be curated by journalist, presenter, translator, literary scholar and producer of Radio Kultura Iryna Slavinska.

The Kids and Teens Program will also take place during Book Arsenal. Its work will be curated by writer, journalist, translator and author of books for kids and teens Olya Rusina.

In addition, the special teens program is prepared by participants of the Litlab Teens.

Manager of cultural and educational projects, editor and literary scholar Yuliia Konopliana will be the curator of the Professional Program this year.

The 13th Book Arsenal will host the Translatorium Literary and Translation Festival with a special program. It will be curated by co-founder and director of the festival Tania Rodionova.

The Book Arsenal Fellowship Program, curated by cultural manager and organizer of programs and projects for professional audiences Oksana Karpiuk, will be held for the second time. It will be a platform for B2B meetings and acquainting of foreign publishers, rights managers and literary agents with the Ukrainian book market.

PEN Ukraine will present a special program of events for the third time.

Publishers will also have separate events in the festival program.

The Festival identity, developed by the Mystetskyi Arsenal design team led by art director Liera Huievska, visually emphasizes the layering and converging of senses of this year’s Focus theme.

 

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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.

Book Arsenal is organized in cooperation with Art Arsenal Community NGO. The festival is supported by the International Renaissance Foundation.The special teens program from the Litlab Teens is supported by the British Council’s program Support for Cultural Activity in Ukraine with UK Involvement.