The World Literature Festival – Fabula 2027

The 2027 World Literature Festival – Fabula, Slovenia’s main literary festival and one of the leading literary events in the wider European space, will once again provide a platform for world-class literature, contemporary humanistic thought and dialogues that transcend the boundaries of language, culture and aesthetics.

The upcoming edition will take place under the slogan Read Dangerously, which understands literature as a space of risk, courage and inner transformation. At a time when reality is fragmenting into contradictory narratives, when intimacy is increasingly becoming a public battlefield and otherness a subject of control, fear and judgement, Fabula asks what it means to read dangerously today – not as an act of provocation, but as a willingness to let literature unsettle us, draw us out of our comfort zones and confront us with voices that society prefers to relegate to the sidelines.

In collaboration with Cankarjev dom, the festival’s main literary events will feature a curated selection of international authors, including Bulgarian writer and poet Rene Karabash, Swiss writer Christian Kracht, Macedonian writer Petar Andonovski and Polish poet and writer Małgorzata Lebda. The programme will be further enriched by additional guests, to be announced as the festival develops. Their works engage, in different ways, with questions of the body, freedom, fear, sexuality, family and historical memory, as well as foreignness, illness, anxiety, ecology and survival. Together, they show that reading is not a safe haven from the world, but a means of approaching it with greater attentiveness, sensitivity and courage.

From the festival’s main literary programme, the slogan Read Dangerously will extend into the theoretical strand of Fabula in Theory, which will explore the relationship between literature, the body, sexuality, language, social control and freedom. Among the planned guests of the essayistic and theoretical programme is Jasna Žmak, author of the book One stvari: Eseji o ženskoj seksualnosti, whose writing opens up a space for reflection on intimacy, corporeality and politics beyond shame and silence.

An important developmental strand of the festival remains the Fabula x CELA programme, which, within the framework of the European CELA platform and in collaboration with Goga publishing house and Cankarjev dom, presents new European literary voices and connects them with emerging translators. In this way, Fabula 2027 continues its commitment to literature as a space of encounter, translation and new perspectives – a space that not only reflects our time, but also teaches us how to read it: attentively, courageously and dangerously.


In collaboration with Beletrina


CD Club, Kosovel Hall, free tickets