Book Arsenal festival opens in Kyiv with 100 publishers participating

The XIII International Book Arsenal Festival begins today, on 29 May, in Kyiv and will run through 1 June 2025, according to festival organizers.

The event brings together 100 major publishers and 12 small publishing houses, accoding to the statement on the website.

The official opening is scheduled for 5 pm on 29 May, but attendees can begin to enter the premises of the National Cultural, Artistic and Museum Complex Mystetskyi Arsenal from 4 pm.

Festival organizers report the event consists of a programmatic section and a book fair. The book fair will be held on the first floor of the Old Arsenal. Publishers will present discussions, presentations and lectures alongside curatorial and special programs.

The festival features more than 200 events across several program tracks. These include the focus theme program, main program, children and teenagers program, and professional program.

This year's focus theme is "Everything Is Translation." Yale University historian and professor Marci Shore and writer, translator and Ukrainian PEN member Oksana Forostyna serve as curators of the focus theme. They selected the theme to address questions of literary, cultural and social translation amid global changes.

The Book Arsenal festival launched in 2011 at the Mystetskyi Arsenal complex. The annual event unites book, literary and artistic communities from around the world. Events include author meetings, workshops, musical and artistic presentations, competitions including book design awards.

Writers, poets, philosophers, illustrators, artists and publishers from Ukraine and more than 50 countries participate in the festival. Approximately 500 international authors have attended over the years of the festival's existence.