This year ŠUŠUR! Festival od riči (Festival of words) will be held in Korčula for the seventh time.
It’s a literary festival, organized by a group of five friends from Zagreb, Split and Belgrade in the town of Korčula, because all five of them say that they are in love with Korčula. They wanted to bring the chatter (the closest translation of šušur I could think of, although I’m not entirely convinced it’s a good enough one) to Korčula, to bring significant writers to the island, to have them talk about literature in the stimulating environment of an old town.
This year the festival will be held in Korčula summer cinema, on Friday evening, starting at 9 pm (in previous years festival used to be held in the centre of the Old Town, right next to the St. Mark’s Cathedral, and has lasted up to a week, but it’s shorter this year), and will be dedicated to the anniversary of year 1968, the role of activism in literature and the heritage that the events of that year left behind. The motto of this year’s festival is Read actively!, and the main topic of discussion will be if writers can influence society with their works, what are the consequences of critical thinking and expressing opinions, as well as the responsibility of authors to address certain societal issues.
In 1968, let’s just remind ourselves, many protests took place, shaking up the status quo of the military and bureaucratic elites of both the Eastern and the Western bloc. Those protests took place in many places in former Yugoslavia, including in Korčula where Praxis, summer school of philosophy helped shape the humanistic future for our country.
Authors participating this year will be Andrej Nikolaidis, writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, author of the novel Hungarian Sentence (unfortunately not translated to English yet), Barbara Matejčić, Croatian freelance journalist and editor, focused at human rights, Nenad Veličković, another author from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who actively discusses the role of literature in education, and Suzana Tratnik, Slovenian author and activist, one of the most notable LGBTQ authors in the region.
After the evening of literary conversations, Šušur! Party will take place, with DJ Ewoks from Belgrade.
