Book Arsenal attendance grows: festival recap – photos

The 12th International Book Arsenal Festival [an annual festival in Kyiv for the development of the book, literary and artistic scenes – ed.] concluded on Sunday, 2 June. Its team summarised the results and shared the achievements of this year's event. Notably, despite the war conditions, the number of visitors increased from 28,000 in 2023 to 35,000 in 2024.

For the second time, the Book Arsenal took place during the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. This year, the organisers implemented additional security measures and ensured the continuation of the festival during power outages. 

Over nearly four festival days, more than 100 Ukrainian publishers and five bookshops presented their stands on the first floor of the Old Arsenal.

The 2024 Book Arsenal event featured more than 260 guests from Ukraine and abroad, including Ukrainian novelist and poet Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukrainian author Tania Maliarchuk, Ukrainian writer and soldier Artur Dron, Ukrainian actor and screenwriter Akhtem Seitablaiev, historian, lecturer and assistant professor Botakoz Kassymbekova, French writer Nicolas Tenzer, UK author and journalist David Patrikarakos, Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Mykhed, Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, author Uilleam Blacker, translator, academic and PhD researcher Jakob Wunderwald, Ukrainian prose writer and poet Yurі Andrukhovych, Ukrainian poet Yaryna Chornohuz, and many others.

A new addition to this year's festival was the professional programme, the Book Arsenal Fellowship Programme. As part of it, seven foreign publishers and agents from Czechia, Poland, Denmark, Georgia, Germany, Greece, and Italy visited the Arsenal.

Partner institutions of the programme, the Ukrainian Book Institute and House of Europe, presented them with statistics on the Ukrainian book market and opportunities for funding the translation of Ukrainian books. Ultimately, participants held over 60 meetings with their Ukrainian counterparts to discuss establishing partnerships.

As usual, the New Releases Showcase was presented at the Book Arsenal. This time, it featured around 200 books published between June 2023 and May 2024, all related to the theme of war. After the festival, these books are donated to libraries that were destroyed or damaged due to the full-scale invasion.

For reference: The International Book Arsenal Festival is an annual project of the Mystetskyi (Art) Arsenal. It first took place in 2011. Since then, almost 500 renowned international authors from over fifty countries have participated in the festival. Each year, about 200 Ukrainian publishers present their publications at the exhibition and fair.

In March 2019, the Book Arsenal was recognised as the best literary festival of the year at the London Book Fair.

In 2022, the festival was cancelled due to the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine.

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