Slovenia officially announced as the guest of honor of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023
In addition to the minister, Juergen Boos, president and general director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and dr. Miha Kovač, co-curator of the Slovenian presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
According to Minister Vreček, the Frankfurt Book Fair is much more than just a fair of publishers and authors. It is a dialogue and a meeting place of different ideas and views. As the guest of honor in 2023, Slovenia will be inviting the domestic and international public to dialogue with Slovenian culture and art by displaying its cultural diversity. In the brochure for Slovenia’s candidacy for guest of honor in 2015, it is written that “Slovenia is a small country, but culture lovers should include it on the list of destinations that must be seen, tasted and felt.” As the minister pointed out, Slovenia is considered a creative center of Central and South-Eastern Europe with many festivals, such as the Vilenica International Literary Festival, which has hosted a number of renowned authors since 1986, some of whom later became Nobel laureates. Slovenia is not only exceptional in publishing, but its cultural activity is very lively and diverse in all areas of art.
As the minister emphasized, art and culture teach us to listen to ourselves and to each other, and thus greatly contribute to the development and spread of a more tolerant and mutually supportive dialogue on the pressing issues of modern times. “Quality artistic content enriches us, opens our horizons, enables the development of critical thinking and stimulates our imagination. Through books we meet and visit different worlds, understand them better, learn to respect diversity, equal opportunities, empathy and openness. towards others and acceptance of oneself.” The Ministry of Culture together with the Public Book Agency of the Republic of Slovenia, cultural institutions dealing with books and reading culture, and the developed national network of public libraries promotes reading and reading literacy of various target groups, especially children and young people .
Miha Kovač, co-curator of the Slovenian presentation, introduced the topics that will be at the forefront of the Slovenian presentation, i.e. the innovation and creativity of small publishers, the importance of reading books in the age of screens and European linguistic diversity. According to Kovač, Slovenian book production is a reflection of European diversity, and at the same time it is unique and original. At the same time, he emphasized that more than 600 translations of Slovenian literary works into various languages were published in the last three years alone, which is a really big number for a community of two million. Kovač added: “Many playwrights, poets, journalists, teachers, priests and everyone who writes and speaks Slovene have woven their language into a peculiar word coat. And this is one of the reasons that today we can celebrate a Slovenian book and speak Slovenian. this stage. Although small, this coat never felt too tight. It is clothed between a rich confluence of influences and few speakers. Slovenian intellectuals are traditionally multilingual, many of them also write in at least one other language. This is where our enthusiasm for the honeycomb of words comes from. Just as bees go out into the world to return home with a drop of nectar and a grain of pollen, so is the Slovenian language culture inspired by various cultural, artistic, linguistic and ideological influences. with many translations and with the help of authors who left Slovenia and went to the world, or those who came to Slovenia from elsewhere. in Slovenian, these influences have been transferred into a diverse but unique and dynamic language in which one can write love sonnets, crime novels and hermetic novels or discuss quantum mechanics and psychoanalysis. In the words of Slovene poet Srečko Kosovel, “I would like to walk around in a little cloak of words. But there should be a warm, bright world hidden underneath.”
As part of the press conference, a conversation took place with Slovenian authors Petr Svetina, Nataša Kramberger and Ana Marwan and translator from Slovenian to German Erwin Köstler, led by German journalist and literary critic Katja Gasser.