Under this motto, the Ruse International Literature Festival is celebrating its 19th anniversary. The festival is the flagship event of the Cultural Centre of the International Elias Canetti Society and traditionally provides a platform for the diverse voices of artists from different generations to be heard. Each with their own theme and their own pain, each with the richness of their mother tongue or the language in which fate allows them to write and speak. The festival begins on the 3rd of October and ends on the 11th of October. During this time, numerous events will take place, including several book launches for Bulgaria. We will be presenting Teodora Dimova’s new book, even before it goes to press. On the opening day, we will introduce two young women from Germany to the audience who represent the younger generation of successful migrant writers. The life and arduous journey of a female artist with Eastern roots towards establishing herself in Western culture will be one of the focal points. This theme will be the central to the festival’s programme over the first two days.
3rd of October, Opening
Jehona Kicaj is a German writer, editor and publisher of Kosovar origin. Her highly acclaimed debut novel, published in 2025, is named “ë”, a title that focuses on the letter that is characteristic to the Albanian alphabet. She received the prestigious HANNA Literature Prize from the City of Hanover as well as the Buddenbrookhaus Debut Prize for her novel. Her book has been a huge success and made it onto the shortlist for the German Book Prize – the most prestigious award in the German-speaking literary world.
Elli Unruh was born in Kazakhstan in 1987 into a Mennonite family and moved to Germany with her parents that very same year, where they were far away from the steppes, the Gulag and the collective trauma of the Soviet Germans. We present her debut novel “Fische im Trüben” (“Fish in Murky Waters”), in which Elli Unruh recounts the life of a Russian-German family who, until the late 1980s, lived in the Soviet Union, in southern Kazakhstan – descendants of the Mennonites who were once brought to the Tsarist Empire by Catherine the Great to establish agricultural colonies there.
4th of October
Rumiana Ebert is a leading figure in contemporary literature, whose life brings together the sciences, music and a subtle poetic and narrative voice. Her autobiographical novel “Schwimmen in der Tinte” (“Swimming in Ink”) was published in 2026. The work is a moving account of the fate of emigrants, of fleeing a totalitarian regime in search of freedom, and of the arduous journey towards self-discovery in a new environment. Ebert was born in Plovdiv in 1945. In 1966, she emigrated to Germany, where she settled and spent the greater part of her adult and creative life. Today she lives in Berlin.
5th of October, Premiere
Elias Canetti’s “Die Stimmen von Marrakesch. Aufzeichnungen nach einer Reise” (“The Voices of Marrakesh: Notes from a Journey”) is being published in Bulgarian for the first time. It comprises 14 observations he made during his first trip outside Europe to the Moroccan city in the 1950s. Particularly interesting is that Canetti did not write the book until 14 years after his three-week journey, relying solely on a few pages of notes. An astonishing memory, captured and recorded by the writer’s senses – a writer who deliberately chose not to learn a single word of Arabic before setting off for Marrakesh. The book has been published by the Publishing House Elias Canetti and was translated from the German by Penka Angelova and Iva Bekyarova.
8th of October, premiere
Teodora Dimova – “Everything That Happens” is the author’s new novel, which is soon to be published. She explains the idea behind it as follows: “For a long time, a completely false version of the story about the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews was forced upon us. We only learnt the truth long after Dimitar Peshev and the others involved in these events had passed away. I became increasingly aware that we owe it to their memory, for what they achieved is unprecedented in our history. Therefore, Dimitar Peshev became the inspiration for my novel.”
The festival programme also features a conversation with Bisera Zankova and Ivo Indzhov on literary journalism, as well as a discussion on the current state of Bulgarian literary magazines published in Ruse and Plovdiv and their distribution. The documentary film ‘Until Tomorrow. Four Portraits and a Memory’ by Stanimir Trifonov will be screened, which, although filmed as far back as 1988, contains statements that remain relevant today. From a historical and videographic perspective, the film is now regarded as part of the wave of ‘disobedient’ documentary filmmaking of the late 1980s, which began to openly expose the cracks in the totalitarian system through personal human stories.
The full programme, including dates, times and venues, can be found on the website of the International Elias Canetti Society.
Detelina Kamenova