Announcing our 2019 Krakow UNESCO City of Literature Residency Programme Writers!

Posted: Thursday Apr 04, 2019

This year Kraków will host four exceptional writers. The artists from Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand will come to Kraków for monthly or two-month residences!

In May Kraków will welcome Georgina Wilding from Nottigham, Creative Director of Nottingham Poetry Festival, as well as being the Founding Editor of Mud Press, and Nottingham’s first young poet laureate. She has performed her poetry both nationally and internationally, and writes to commission for organisations such as BBC Radio Nottingham and the Royal Shakespeare Society. She has been published in journals such as “The Rialto”, and teaches poetry and performance across the midlands. Georgina will stay in Kraków until the end of June.

Koraly Dimitriadis form Melbourne will join us in June. Koraly is a Cypriot-Australian writer, actor, and the author of the poetry books Just Give Me The Pills and Love and F—k Poems. The latter is a bestseller for the poetry genre in Australia, and has had rights sold into Europe. Her two books form the basis of her poetic play “I say the wrong things all the time” which premiered in Melbourne’s renowned La Mama Theatre. Koraly is currently developing her debut novel, Divided Island, a love story set in Melbourne and Cyprus that explores how our upbringing effects who we love and how we love. She writes opinion for the Australian media and has been published in The Independent(UK) and The Washington Post internationally. Much of Koraly’s work is to do with cultural and religious repression. She is also working on a non-fiction book called Not Till You’re Married

In autumn, we will welcome two more residents. Liz Breslin and Nadia Bailey will spend two months (September and October) in our city of literature.

Representing Dunedin Liz Breslin writes plays, poems, stories and a fortnightly column, Thinking Allowed, for the “Otago Daily Times”. Her poetry collection, Alzheimer’s and a spoon (Otago University Press), was listed as one of The NZ Listener’s Top 100 Books of 2017. At home on the page and on the stage, Liz’s recent performances include ‘Love in a time of netball’ at the sold-out Wanaka season of Tall Tales and True, and the back end of Jill the Cow for her 2018 pantomime, Jac and the Beansprouts.

Nadia Bailey is an author, journalist and critic. She has published three non-fiction books on popular culture with Smith Street Books, and her short fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction has been widely represented in journals and independent presses. She was awarded highly commended in the 2017 OutStanding Queer Short Story Award, first place in the 2014 Adrien Abbott Poetry Prize among others. Her work has appeared in “The Lifted Brow”, “Cordite”, “The Australian and The Age/SMH”. She holds a Masters Degree in Creative Writing. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

The residents will stay in the guest rooms of Villa Decius, project co-organizer. During their stays, you will have a chance to get to know them better at festivals, author’s meetings and other literary events.

The Krakow UNESCO City of Literature Residency Program is dedicated to writers from the Cities of Literature of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. It aims to provide writers with a platform to showcase their work and talent to a Central European audience, support greater diversity of voices and literatures on the Polish and Central European book market and offer local writers the chance to create links with international writers as well.