The BookStar European Literature Festival, which will be held from October 3 to 5 in Skopje, has announced the final list of participants, which includes impressive names from the world of literature.

In addition to the eleven foreign participants - Irsa Sigurdardottir (Iceland), Svetlana Aleksievich (Belarus), Igor Styx (Croatia), Daina Opolskaite (Lithuania), Nadja Teranova (Italy), Monika Kompanikova (Slovakia), Kristina Gavran (Croatia), Petar Denchev ( Bulgaria), Bogdan - Alexandru Stanescu (Romania), Olja Stojanova Dzakova (Bulgaria), Sasha Stanisic (Germany), there are also two Macedonian representatives in the program - Vladimir Jankovski and Petar Andonovski.

In addition to the guests, local authors Nikola Madzhirov, Biljana Crvenkovska, Elizabeta Bakovska, Aleksandar Madjarovski, Jordan Kocevski, Snezhana Stojchevska, Ana Golejska Djikova, Elena Filipovska, Dushko Krstevski, Stojan Lekoski, Jelena Luzhina and others will participate in various festival events.

The festival previously announced that Nobel laureate Svetlana Aleksandrovna Aleksievich (1948) is the winner of the 2022 Bookstar Prize for the book War Has No Female Face. She is probably one of the most significant living persons of today, and her work is among the most relevant in this turbulent historical section of which we are contemporaries.

She is the winner of a huge number of awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. Alexievich is the creator of a completely new, non-fiction genre. He has published five books, a kind of epic called "Voices of Utopia". "War has no female face" is the first book in this series and one of the most famous books about war. During the Second World War, about one million women fought on the side of the Red Army, but nothing was ever written about them.

The "Bukstar" festival will be held from October 3 to 5, 2022 at several locations in Skopje under the motto "Brave new words". The festival is supported by the Ministry of Culture, the City of Skopje, the literary network "Traduki", the European Union, "Taxi Global", and individual events by the Icelandic Fund for Culture, the European Prize for Literature, the Romanian Institute of Culture, the Embassies of Italy, Slovakia and Romania.

The festival program will take place in the Youth Cultural Center, and part of the events in the "Brothers Miladinovci" library - Skopje and in the KSP "Centar - Jadro". The visual identity is co-authored by Denica Stojkoska and Stefan Tankov.

(The text was published in "Cultural Press" No. 148, in the print edition of the newspaper "Free Press" on October 1-2, 2022)