In addition to the recipient of the Golden Wreath, the famous Romanian poetess Anna Blandiana, as well as to the recipient of the Bridges of Struga Award, the young Croatian poetess Monica Herceg, more than 30 of the invited foreign poets from a variety of countries have confirmed their participation in this year’s edition of the festival.

We will pinpoint a few of them, like Rafael Soler from Spain, eminent Spanish poet and storyteller; Satchidanandan, one of the most significant poets of India who writes also in Malayalam language; Mia Lecomte from Italy, poetess with French roots; István Kemény from Hungary, one of the most outstanding contemporary Hungarian poets; but also Yorgos Yannopoulos from Greece, a poet whom the Macedonian audience has to some degree met before.

The Festival will also feature the most esteemed poets from the Republic of North Macedonia, poets from different generations, as well as the poets that were selected for the competition for this year’s Brakja Miladinovci Award.

Among the publications of the new Struga Poetry Evenings Festival, apart from the luxury monograph on the recipient of the Golden Wreath, all the preparations are at the very end for the book of the recipient of the Bridges of Struga Award and the English translation of the book of the last year’s winner of the Brakja Miladinovci Award, as well as the booklets on the poets from the Versopolis platform. We have also prepared a premium edition that will represent the most renown Macedonian poets.

The festival, apart from the traditional elements that became the trademarks of the festival, envisions additional content that will contribute for a greater scope and visibility of the festival.

With the idea to increase the visibility and the openness of the festival, apart from the direct TV coverage of the main festival meetings by the North Macedonian public broadcaster MRT, we also arranged for live streaming of the events on our official YouTube channel, which will allow the festival to come closer to aficionados around the world.

Struga Poetry Evenings yearns to upgrade the linguistic level of the festival, as part of its efforts to improve the quality of the event, its international reputation and relevance, but also to enhance the relationship with its audience and the citizens. In this respect, parts of this year’s program, and in particular the major festival meetings and communication with the public, will include a range of languages. Besides the current Macedonian and English language, we will speak both Albanian and French.

Hopefully, the Translation workshops of the incoming editions of the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival will provide us with new translations from Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, but also other major world languages. The Struga Poetry Evenings, as a global literary event and as a place of worship of the language in its most creative form, suits multilingualism very much!

The Republic of North Macedonia is a full member of the International Organization of la Francophonie, and that’s why we intend to nurture French language.

At the same time, the use of the Macedonian language and the Albanian language correlates Government’s language policy, the Law on languages, and breathes in the spirit of the new strategy for the society and the interculturalism.

The Struga Poetry Evenings Festival is both international and Struga-based! It is a festival that Struga citizens rightfully boast of and encourage! Therefore, the upgrade of the level of linguistic communication is the foremost goal of the festival, as a means of reintroducing the open-space poetry readings, which, by the way, have always been the icon of the festival.

Poetry and languages are the civilization’s channel of interlinking and communication between the individuals and the peoples and contribute to the plethora of varieties that we nurture in our country.