Project:  South and East reaches West - digital platform for promotion of writers in post-conflict societies

Description: The cooperation project South and East reaches West - digital platform for promotion of writers in post-conflict societies aims to link various partners active in the field of literature promotion and dissemination. The aim is to create new capacities employing a new business model with the Literary Agent for literatures of Southeast, Southern and Eastern Europe, and strengthen the transnational mobility through the network of writers-in-residence programs. The literary agent will be selected and trained in the course of the project, and his/her long-term mission will be to establish a new literary agency dealing with translation rights for literatures written in less used languages. Using the joint digital platform, which will be another outcome of the project, the partners and the agent will present the region of Southeast Europe as a region of extraordinary literary creativity. The project will thus build new capacities in Europe’s South and East, and will present the best literary voices of these regions to facilitate their translations to major European languages. The project will also aid writers to professionalize and internationalize their careers through their increased visibility and mobility. The focus of the project will be on writers who in their works warn of the perils of nationalism and intolerance. Through a network of residencies and visit to festivals, the project will offer a platform to writers coming from different (post)conflict regions of Europe to exchange and share with the general audience their views on the consequences of these two phenomena. In view of the recent rise of the right-wing populism and neo-fascist movements throughout Europe, the cooperation partners believe that especially these literary voices from Southeast Europe need to be heard in other crisis regions of Europe, such as Cyprus and Ukraine, and read in major European languages.