Tartu International Literature Festival Prima Vista festival will take place in autumn this year

Tartu International Literature Festival Prima Vista that has traditionally taken place in May will this year be adjourned to autumn because of the emergency situation. The events and meetings with writers inspired by the theme of the festival Human Shadows will take place in September and November.

The planned events of the festival programme will partly take place on 21-26th September and partly on 9-14th November. ‘We are extremely happy that many writers have already promised to be present in the second half of the year and are looking forward to meeting with Estonian audience,’ said Annika Aas, the chairwoman of the non-profit association Prima Vista festival. Uwe Laub, Klaus Modick, Lina Wolff, Marek Krajewski, Viktor Shenderovich, Aleksey Salnikov, Timofey Serdechniy, and Ron Whitehead have all confirmed their readiness to come to Tartu. And certainly this year patron of the festival Viivi Luik will be present.

The events will be distributed between two weeks as due to a very dense programme not all the guests could plan their visit at the same time. ‘Dissipating the events over two weeks will in fact give the audience a better opportunity to participate as the programme will not be as intensive as usual,” was Aas positive about autumn. ‘We shall as always offer meetings with authors and presentations of books, the programme includes several discussions and naturally also a youth programme and we also plan to organize the traditional book fair in September. Several cooperation projects are expected where literature will encounter other domains.’

Prima Vista has already reached an agreement with the international interdisciplinary festival Crazy Tartu taking place at the same time in November; the festival is also prepared to find a joint area with the Researchers’ Night and the student days taking place in September. 

The partner town of Prima Vista in this year is Cēsis in Latvia.

The festival, initially planned to take place on 4-9th May, will at that time be marked with a video programme in web channels. Through the web both the guests of this year’s festival and the Estonian poets who participated in the international project Borderlines of the non-profit association Lavaluule (Performance poetry) will have a word, helping to connect through video recordings two very different – the last year and the present springs

This year the theme of Prima Vista festival is Human Shadows, centered around memory, mental health and the impact of human actions on the environment.