News

/ 10 December 2016

New Literature Festival in Lithuania

Vilniaus lapai/ Vilnius leaves

As the end of the year is approaching, a new literary festival titled Vilniaus lapai (Vilnius Leaves) was born in Vilnius. Having started on Friday, it will last until the end of the week and twelve events dedicated to good literature will be presented to the audience.

As this event is meant to lay proper attention on public readings of writers and poets, the main axis of the festival is literary authors and their works: poets and prose writers will read their pieces of writing and communicate with the audience. Readings of poetry and prose as well as discussions and jazz evenings will take place throughout the festival.

The festival is aimed at popularisation of public literary readings intended for the general public and not for professionals. All those to whom the book matters have the opportunity to hear interesting national literary authors Danutė Kalinauskaitė and Rolandas Rastauskas. Saturday evening will be dedicated to Hallgrimur Helgason, an Icelandic novelist, and his book The Woman at 1000°.

The first day of the festival was started by national laureate Rolandas Rastauskas, literary critic Virginija Cibarauskė, jazz virtuosos Dmitrijus Golovanovas and Arkadijus Gotesmanas. Right after this evening the poetry and jazz event took place where three Lithuanian VERSOPOLIS poets read. VERSOPOLIS project is represented by the International Literary Festival Druskininkai Poetic Fall. Three poets, namely Marius Burokas, Giedrė Kazlauskaitė and Mindaugas Nastaravičius, participated in the jazz event too and lives of Versopolis poets were recorded in the photos of the exhibition held by manipuliacija.lt and poet, photographer Dainius Dirgėla. Their lives and their drawers, too; some lines remain but in the drawers, don’t they?

On Saturday and Sunday, even more young poets representing Lithuania in the VERSOPOLIS project, namely Ramunė Brundzaitė, Vytautas Stankus and Jurgita Jasponytė, will participate in various readings.

Poetry is everywhere: each and every visitor of the events will be able to take away its fragments in pretty postcards, the poems of five guests, Versopolis poets introduced during the festival Druskininkai Poetic Fall 2016 in October; the festival Vilniaus lapai (Vilnius Leaves) welcomed texts by Veronika Dintinjana, Athena Farrokhzad, Tiziano Fratus, Aurelia Lassaque, Julia Szychowiak.

Pictures by Dainius Dirgėla