Macedonian
The second edition of the Winter poetry festival of Struga Poetry Evenings will be held from 25th February to 1st March. The opening ceremony will take place at the Youth Cultural Center in Skopje, beginning at 8.00 pm.
According to the programme concept, the Winter poetry festival is an expansion of the programme which through different activities enables the National institution “Struga Poetry Evenings” to deepen its role in the Macedonian culture and present the most important contemporary world poets, also the current literary achievements in the Macedonian poetry.
In its first edition, the Winter poetry festival offered a different approach of the concept, the structure, the method of presentation, but also of the target audience and many other things. Giving a bigger focus on the four poets whose work is remarkable worldwide in its aesthetic and artistic values, whereupon through the scope of three different approaches is presented to the Macedonian literary audience: publishing projects, academic lectures of the participants and poetry readings and literary discussions.
The festival is based on the publishing activity of SPE, on the authors whose work has been published in Macedonian translation in the prestigious “Pleiades” edition. Through the Winter poetry festival we enable a wider and more fundamental reception of the poets’ work.
With the academic lectures of the poets, which are organized in collaboration with the Faculty of Philology “Blaze Koneski” in Skopje, as a partner in the organization of the festival, the students, also the other academic audience will have the opportunity to be introduced to the poetic and aesthetic aspects of the poets’ work, but also to be introduced to the interesting literary discussions. Eventually, using the poetry portraits, which beside the poetry readings also include discussions with extraordinary informed moderators, we continue with our mission, not just by offering a quality programme, but also attracting a new audience, new readers. That is the main focus of this festival – the development of new audience.
This year’s participants of the Winter poetry festival of SPE will be Lasse Soderberg from Sweden, Habi Tengour from Algeria, Ghassan Zaqtan form Palestine and the Macedonian poet Ivan Djeparoski, the recipient of the “Brothers Miladinov” award in 2016 for the best poetry book written in Macedonian language and published between two editions of SPE.
Outstanding writers, current and provocative with their work, winners of prestigious awards, published in dozen of languages.
The Swedish poet, Lasse Soderberg has already been published by Struga Poetry Evenings with the poetry selection “The Earth is Blue” in 2013, while the poetry selection of Ghassan Zaqtan “Like a Straw Bird it Follows me” will be promoted at this year’s Winter poetry festival. In the same “Pleiades” edition of SPE the book of poetry selection of Habib Tengour’s work will be promoted during this year’s Struga Poetry Evenings in August, as well as Ivan Djeparoski’s book “The Light of Mount Athos” in English. For this edition of the Winter poetry festival, SPE has published several voluminous multilingual booklets for each of the participants, booklets which will be available to the visitors at the events, which will allow them to acquire a more comprehensive insight of their work.
In the role of moderators – talkers of this year’s participants of the festival will be several our professors, literary critics and poets, including academician Vlada Urosevic, Lidija Kapusevska Drakulevska, Snezana Petrova, Zoran Ancevski and Vladimir Martinovski.
The lectures of the poet-participants will be organized at the Faculty of Philology “Blaza Koneski” in Skopje, the portraits and the poetry readings at salon 19.19 at the Cultural Information Center in Skopje.
An expansion of the Winter poetry festival is planned for next year’s edition to the universities in Bitola, Stip, Ohrid and Tetovo.
Booklets
