This year, Book Arsenal will be held from May 28 (the evening of the official opening) to May 31. The festival will consist of the program component and the book fair on the first floor of the Old Arsenal building.
The curator of the Focus Theme of the festival will be human rights activist, military serviceman, public figure and journalist Maksym Butkevych.
-
- Maksym Butkevych. Photo by Anna Putylina
Writer, military serviceman and volunteer Andriy Lyubka will curate the Writer’s Program.
-
- Andriy Lyubka. Photo by Serhiy Khandusenko
We are working hard on Book Arsenal-2026 and believe that it will be exceptional. I am grateful to Maksym and Andriy for their trust and willingness to work with us to make Book Arsenal exactly what we love it for: intelligent, relevant to its time, intellectually profound and aesthetically captivating. We will do everything possible to achieve this and, if necessary, even a little bit of impossible. Because Book Arsenal is the festival that gives us all hope and encourages us all to think, work and experience the joy of being, even in difficult times
—Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, Director General of the Mystetskyi Arsenal.
Publishing houses and bookstores are invited to be sales operators at the exhibition-fair. Bookstores will present selections of books in foreign languages.
Special conditions will apply to small publishing houses—those with 2 to 10 published books in their publishing portfolio. We also invite artists to participate in the Illustrators’ Fair.
The Book Arsenal program, which will be developed by invited curators, will include events within the Focus Theme of the Festival, the Main Program, the Writer’s Program, the Kids and Teens Program, the Professional Program, as well as performative and musical events. We will also present exhibition projects and special programs of the festival.
The Festival will also host the annual professional Book Arsenal Fellowship Program for foreign publishers and literary agents that contributes to strengthening international cooperation with Ukraine in the book field by establishing direct contacts between professionals from Ukraine and abroad and acquainting with the local literary and book scenes.
For the safety of the participants of the fair and the events the simplest bomb shelter is available in the Mystetskyi Arsenal.
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.