The City of Ljubljana has submitted its candidacy for the UNESCO title ‘Ljubljana – City of Literature’.

Following the all-round success of Ljubljana’s year as UNESCO World Book Capital 2010, when books and reading were the central theme of events and media attention not just in Ljubljana but also in Slovenia and the world, last December the then Mayor Zoran Janković put his signature to Ljubljana’s candidacy for the UNESCO title Ljubljana – City of Literature, prepared by the City of Ljubljana’s Culture Department.

The candidacy programme promotes Ljubljana as a book capital at national and international level. It focuses on the awareness that the book is the subject of general culture and knowledge, while with the acquisition of the UNESCO City of Literature title Ljubljana would affirm its commitment to long-term support of the development of the book sector. Announcements have included a book festival entitled Holiday of Books, as well as the continuation of the annual Literature of the World festival, the Book and the City project and the opening of a voluntary centre for teaching the reading and writing of literature.

In 2010, when Ljubljana held the UNESCO title World Book Capital, it was confirmed that in Ljubljana the book has a home and readers. The Literature of the World Festival has brought globally known and current authors to Ljubljana, and uses diverse approaches to promote literature and has achieved great public popularity.

With the new literary festival the Holiday of the Book, which is foreseen to run for about a month (in late spring or early summer 2013), Ljubljana intends to link a number of players in the reading culture sector and to use events, especially in public open spaces, to provide a distinctive literary pulse in the capital.

The heritage of the programme framework of the Book and the City, part of Ljubljana’s World Book Capital 2010 programme will also be kept alive in the future and throughout the country.
The establishment of a centre to assist students in written expression and to help teachers who would like to inspire students on the art of the word along the lines of Project 826, set up by a group of writers from San Francisco, will open doors in Ljubljana to all those that would like to take part in its socially useful operation for young people and raise awareness of the meaning of aesthetic communication among primary school children as well as older people. Volunteers will work in the centre, while key roles will be played by the newspaper for arts, culture and society entitled ‘Views’, first published on 7 April 2010 as part of the Ljubljana – World Book Capital 2010 project, and the ‘Young Dragons’ city public institute, which works as a centre for free-time activities for children and young people. The Slovenian Writers’ Association and the Slovenian Ministry of Education will also be invited to participate.

We at the City of Ljubljana will invite all sectors of society that operate in the book sector in Slovenia into co-designing and implementing programmes prepared in the candidacy for the acquisition of the permanent UNESCO title of City of Literature.

In the text accompanying the candidacy nomination, poet Veno Taufer, President of the Slovenian Writers’ Association wrote: “In 2010, when writers and poets from all around the world came to Ljubljana, in the year of the World Book Capital, I thought not infrequently of the tragic fate of many Slovene writers, men of feathers, whose life and work were dedicated not only to their own survival but also the survival of the nation, its language and spirit, whose excessive loves and cruel fates accumulated in this language, stories, poems. On some streets, by certain old medieval houses, Renaissance palaces, Baroque buildings, by the river, when I walked among many important, renowned writers and their foreign rumours, I thought of those that died young of tuberculosis, many exhausted, unrecognised but in love with their artistic vocation: look, they awaited you, you can be proud of your vision, becoming a global vision of the brotherhood of writers. From something totally banal or an event marked by suffering, if it is touched by the poetry of thought, the poetry of solidarity, visionary, a new human miracle can be made”.

The ‘City of Literature’ title is awarded by UNESCO as part of its Creative Cities Network, and the recipients thus far are Edinburgh (2004), Melbourne and Iowa (2008), Dublin (2010) and Reykjavik (2011).

UNESCO will make its assessment of Ljubljana’s candidacy in May this year and several cities may simultaneously put forward candidacies.