MANTUA – From Sept. 7 to 11, the city will host the 26^th edition of Festivaletteratura which will be particularly focused on Irish literature in the year of the 100^th anniversary of Ulysses by James Joyce.

 After a two-year break due to the pandemic, literary events are returning to the Lombardian city of Mantua. The 2022 edition of Festivaletteratura will host outstanding writers and interpreters of international literature from all over the world, among others Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk and Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut.

 This year, the Italian literary festival will be particularly devoted to Irish literature, in the centenary year of James Joyce's Ulysses - a modernist work of the 20th century reflecting on streams of consciousness. The polyphony of voices will thus be one of the leitmotifs of the literary meetings. During the festival, the translator and literary critic, Enrico Terrinoni will have opportunity to present his reflections on Ulysses and Italian presences it contains.

 The organisers of the festival figuratively described contemporary Irish literature as a group of stories in constant tension, made up of a wide range of literary texts that invariably fascinate many readers. To testify to Irish literary vitality, meetings will be organized with authors, including Anne Enright, John Banville, Jan Carson, Sebastian Barry, and Anne Griffin.

 Festivaletteratura has been taking place since 1997. Every year in September, five days are dedicated to meetings with authors from different countries, readings, guide tours, performances and concerts. Every year, the festival hosts internationally renowned narrators and poets, and presents interesting voices of emerging literature. Furthermore, literary events are an opportunity to focus on national histories, global tensions, identity crises, and routes of emancipation emerging in novels, poetry, journalistic texts, memoirs, comics and theatre texts.

 The 26^th edition of the festival will involve the activity of readers in development and creating a public space, more than in the recent years. This will include promoting a popular initiative Act on Reading. Other important topics that will be tackled during the Festivaletteratura, concern the current world problems and how to narrate them, referring to climate change and the war in Ukraine.

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