Literature and Sport
Literary Talks Summer 2024
The summer edition of Literary Talks will take place on the 14th and 15th of June. The theme this time will be "Literature and Sport" and, of course, the Talks will be predominantly outdoors and with active sports in three (very close to each other) locations of the Borisova Garden on the side of the Iztok District – Sunny Garden, One More Park Bar and National Tennis Center. Among the significant meetings with writers and interesting discussions, the audience will be able to interact directly, closely and playing sports together with different authors for two days. Some of the special guests will be the British writer Chris Cleave and the tennis player Magdalena Maleeva. Events throughout the program are free to attend and the audience is invited to all of them.
Literary Talks Spring 2024 is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sofia Municipality, Culture Programme.
Literary Talks is organized by the Reading Sofia Foundation. They are realized in partnership with the ICU Publishing House, One More Park Bar, National Sports Academy (NSA) "Vassil Levski", and Sport Depot.
About us
Literary Talks is the title of the latest series of events by the Reading Sofia Foundation. They will be held several times a year with different guests, highlights, and in a variety of formats.
The first edition was in June 2022 at the Toplocentrala Centre for Contemporary Arts. The guest of honour was the Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk. The first day saw her meeting with the Bulgarian audience alongside Georgi Gospodinov. The second day was a 7-hour collage of multiple events and various encounters with literature across the whole Toplocentrala Centre for Contemporary Arts. The Fall edition of 2022 offered an international discussion themed “Literary 2022: Based on a True Story” and a literary quiz.
Reading Sofia is consistently working with discovery and understanding of different literary contexts and interesting interactions therein. Literary Talks are a continuation of the same tendency. A significant part of the Foundation’s activity is dedicated to the connection between literature and the other arts and sciences, as well as to how we can experience literature live, what form can literary events take.
Taking this more performative approach was the programme of Literary Talks Spring 2023, themed “Choices”. The connection to the following political elections was obvious, but choices were literary embedded in the format of the event in late March. The summer edition of Literary Talks 2023 was on the 24th and 25th of June in partnership with Sfumato Theatre. At the same time started the annual festival "Small Season" at the theatre. The theme that united the program of both events was "War and Peace". The focus of the summer Literary Talks was on various types of writing, the testimonials and storytelling, literary journalism, reportages, essays, and letters - writing that narrates, analyses, and is also documentative.
The Autumn edition of Literary Talks 2023 was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Italian writer Italo Calvino. The Reading Sofia Foundation continues its quest to blend arts and approaches to a diversity of topics. The event offered different entrances to Calvino's rich biography and writings. The program began with the performance "Mr. Palomar," continued with the discussion "The Writer Who Plays with the Genres, the Style, the Beginnings" and ended with a reading of original texts inspired by "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler". The autumn edition was organized in partnership with Cinelibri and in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, Casa Libri, and Colibri.
Highlights
