Meet me in Belgrade vol.1 – International publishers meetings at XVI KROKODIL Festival

19 Jun Meet me in Belgrade vol.1 – International publishers meetings at XVI KROKODIL Festival

This year, the KROKODIL Association is initiating the Meet me in Belgrade program – international publishers meetings. The goal of this program, which will be held as part of the KROKODIL Festival, is to create an international platform that allows local, regional and foreign publishers to get to know each other, exchange experiences and ideas, initiate new projects and cooperation.

On Friday, June 21, 27 publishers from 9 countries will gather in the Debate Zone of the KROKODIL Festival (the park in front of the Museum of Yugoslavia) for a series of B2B meetings that will include a dynamic, short mutual introduction of all present publishers, analogous to the popular speed dating format, as well as four longer one-on-one sessions lasting half an hour each, divided into two blocks.

The next day, on Saturday, June 22, at 10:00 a.m., a panel discussion will be held on the topic of residencies for literary creators and their role and contribution they can make to publishing business. The participants of the panel will be writer Dora Šustić, current resident of KROKODIL’s House for Writers; writer and translator Maja Ručević, laureate of the literary residencies project Ulysses’ Shelter; Nevena Milojević, rights manager at Laguna publishing house; and German Gácio Baquiola, coordinator of the International Alliance of Independent Publishers. The panel will be moderated by Maja Vuković Biserko, and it will be held in English.

Meet me in Belgrade vol. 1 is supported by LIT-UP and READ projects.

LIT-UP is a Creative Europe project aiming at defining and implementing competitive strategies to empower publishers and authors working with less used languages in front of big players in a global context. Strategies defined will try to help them, via activities and trainings, to compete with real opportunities of survival against big languages and players working in their own markets.

The project – Regional Network for Cultural Diversity contributes to reconciliation and intercultural tolerance by opening new channels of communication for the independent cultural societies, offering them networking opportunities away from the political stage. In the Western Balkan countries, few mechanisms provide regional cultural communication. The project addresses this gap by offering networking opportunities that facilitate the exchange of experiences through joint projects, public events and campaigns. These promote diverse cultural initiatives and provide space for the presentation of the work of smaller grassroots initiatives in the regional arena.
READ is funded by the European Commission within the Civil Society and Media Program and is implemented by Goethe-Institut Skopje together with the Partner organizations: Center for Balkan Cooperation – Loja (North Macedonia), Fondacioni Instituti i Librit dhe i Promocionit (Albania), Kalem Culture Association (Turkey), Association Krokodil (Serbia) and Qendra Multimedia (Kosovo).