Book Arsenal Fellowship Program 2024

We received applications for participation in the Book Arsenal Fellowship Program 2024 from 17 countries. As a result, 7 participants were selected.

We invite Ukrainian publishers and rights managers to meet the participants of the Book Arsenal Fellowship Program 2024 in the B2B format.

To organize B2B meetings with the program participants, please, contact them directly by their email addresses or write to the email address of the organizers – [email protected]

On Friday, May 31, from 2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. and on Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.a separate location in the space of the 12th International Book Arsenal Festival will be assigned for meetings of Ukrainian and foreign publishers and rights managers.

The participants of the Fellowship Program will receive in advance information about the Ukrainian book market and the opportunities of supporting the publication of translations of Ukrainian works abroad.

THE LIST OF THE PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS

Francesca Varotto
Editor

After completing a master’s degree in publishing at the LMU in Munich, Francesca Varotto worked as a bookseller and in the rights and editorial departments of different publishing houses in Germany, starting then to collaborate with several international publishing houses as a literary scout from Northern European countries. She is editor-in-chief of the foreign fiction list at Marsilio Editori, which is part of the Feltrinelli Group.

E-mail: [email protected]

Nestoras Poulakos
Publisher

Nestoras Poulakos is a publisher & co-founder of Vakxikon Publications in Greece. Vakxikon Publications is the largest poetry publishing house, the third largest literature publishing house, and it’s included among the 30 largest publishers in the country (17th place). He has been the general secretary of the Association of Book Publishers (2016-2019). He participates every year in several publishing fellowship programs (Bruxelles, Taiwan, Istanbul, Sharjah, Ljubljana, etc.).

E-mail: [email protected]

Anna Schmidt Andersen
Editor and translator

Editor at Forlæns Publishing since 2018.
Freelance translator,
Main focus is children’s books and comics.

E-mail: [email protected]

David Kakabadze
Translator, publisher

David Kakabadze, 65, is a journalist, translator and publisher. He worked as a reporter for Georgian media outlets and headed the Goethe Cabinet at the Tbilisi State University. For 25 years he worked at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich. Since 2021 he is the Chief Editor at Siesta Publishing. Over the years, he has translated works by German-language authors into Georgian, including Schnitzler, Brecht, Frisch, Boell. He has also translated texts from Czech (Havel) and Ukrainian (Chekh).

E-mail: [email protected]

Frank Henseleit-Lucke
Publisher, Translator, Author

Frank Henseleit is a translator and publisher from Cologne, Germany. His Kupido Literaturverlag publishes Sofia Yablonska’s works in German. The first German translation of “Ivan and Phoebe” by Oksana Lutsyshyna will be published in autumn 2024.

E-mail: [email protected]

Beata Stasinska 
Literary Agent

Beata Stasińska, (b.1960) in eighties was an editor of an underground trade union newspaper Wola, published by the “Solidarity”, in nineties co-editor of a literary supplement “Ex libris”. As cofounder of W.A.B. Publishers she managed the editorial and the rights departments. She introduced such foreign writers like Imre Kertesz, Michel Houellebecq, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Mo Yan, Alice Munro and Oksana Zabuzhko to the Polish audience.
From 2017 she is a literary agent.

E-mail: [email protected]

Jan Kravčík
Writer, Translator, Publisher

Jan majored in Slavic Studies at Charles University in Prague and specialised in modern Croatian war prose. In addition to his job as a senior advisor at the Czech Government Office in the field of regulatory policy, he has 25 years of experience in the publishing industry, be it as an author, translator, book designer, editor, or publisher. As such, he was able to introduce several award-winning authors from central and southeastern Europe to the Czech audience.

E-mail: [email protected]


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. 

The Book Arsenal Fellowship Program, Kyiv, Ukraine, takes place for the first time within the 12th International Book Arsenal Festival and is supported by Partnership Fund for Resilient Ukraine (PFRU), funded by aid from the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, the United States of America, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden.

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