In this week’s round-up of literary news, our editors bring news of resistance, commemoration, and solidarity. In North Macedonia, a powerful literary prize pushes back against repression by celebrating marginalised voices. In the Philippines, a local organisation is using independent publishing to express solidarity with Palestine and push back against the industrial market complex. In Greece, a new publication celebrates the brief life of a communist activist. Read on to find out more!
Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia
Štefica Cvek, a regional literary contest open to Macedonian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin authors, recently announced the twenty-two titles of its 2025 longlist. Held for the fourth year in a row, the contest highlights the best books written from queer, feminist, decolonial, class-conscious, and ecology-minded perspectives. Akin to this year’s Budapest Pride march, which drew historic crowds despite governmental repression, the celebration of queerness at the core of the Štefica Cvek contest remains a controversial issue within the greater Macedonian cultural context.
Noting that Macedonian LGBTQ+ activists operate within “one of the most regressive anti-gay regimes in Europe,” the British human rights activist Peter Tatchell has praised them as “heroes and heroines.” Not only are same-sex marriages still unrecognized under Macedonian law, but queerness itself is actively demonized in both political and cultural spheres. As recently as February 2025, both the Macedonian government and its opposition have weaponized accusations of queerness to discredit their political rivals, and only a month prior, the Orthodox Church—with the endorsement of many prominent Macedonian politicians and writers—reviled gay marriage as “a violation of the holy will of God . . . and a prerequisite for the dissolution of the family.”
Unfortunately, LGBTQ+ oppression does not remain confined to discourse and legislature. Violence—such as that which took place during the 2013 attacks on the Skopje Queer Center, wherein stones were thrown at demonstrators and the building was set on fire—is the potential and actual outcome of such rhetoric. For this very reason, expression that defies heteronormative and patriarchal modes of existence, as well increased visibility through cultural events like Štefica Cvek, are essential.
The contest is named after the eponymous character in Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life (Štefica Cvek u raljama života) by Dubravka Ugrešić, an antiheroine who defied the rules governing women’s appearance and lifestyles. The longlisted works embody her subversive spirit, representing those who “are expelled from (and stand in opposition to!) the canon.” As stated in the call to action, Štefica Cvek is more than a literary contest—it is “a cultural protest, a history parallel to the dominant one.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
At the heart of Philippine indie publishing, a grassroots movement is using zines to disrupt dominant narratives and express solidarity with Palestine. Better Living Through Xeroxography (BLTX)—a long-running, travelling, small press expo—has spent June mobilising the zine community to boycott the Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse or FBM, where the Philippines is set to be 2025 Guest of Honour) and build a library of pro-Palestinian publications. Notably, on June 28, BLTX took part in the International Day of Action against the Genocide on Palestine and War on Iran at the University of the Philippines-Diliman, offering and trading free zines and calling for more contributions.
Beyond the FBM director’s overt support for Israeli institutions, the book fair’s ties to the Israeli war machine run deep through its German government and corporate backers, which include multinational publishing giants that maintain large-scale investments in Israeli tech firms upholding genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The fair’s venue, Messe Frankfurt, additionally operates an Israeli subsidiary while hosting arms expos where Israeli weapons manufacturers showcase drone systems and surveillance tech ‘field-tested’ on Palestinian civilians; this same exhibition centre that applauds cultural diversity (proudly attended by Filipinos) in October is turned into showrooms for apartheid technologies at other times of the year.
In an open forum at the National Museum of Fine Arts, BLTX co-founder, poet, and scholar Conchitina Cruz lambasted FBM as ‘a platform that can so easily obfuscate the routine exclusion of Palestine while routinely invoking “diversity of expression” or “cultural exchange” or “freedom of speech” as values’. Her co-founder, book designer and art educator Adam David, likewise appealed to fellow Filipino cultural workers to ‘decide how we want our country and our people to be seen and understood and remembered by our fellow Filipinos and also by the world’, adding: ‘There is no “trabaho lang” (work divorced from activism) in the face of genocide’.
Since early this year, BLTX has been curating a Palestinian zine library and collecting komiks, zines, posters, flyers, bookmarks, stickers, and more from Filipino artists. Included in the library is a limited-edition reprint of Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s short story, ‘This Sea is Mohammad al-Khatib’s’ (published by Paper Trail Projects) with illustrations by artist Apol Sta. Maria. Also part of the library is a four-page lyric essay by Nathan Mounayer and Josel Nicolas titled FALESTIN.
BLTX, in the words of publisher Faye Cura in Curating as Feminist Organizing, ‘was launched in a hole-in-the-wall bar in Metro Manila on December 3, 2010’. Over the years, it has transitioned into a community composed of independent writers’ groups, literary clubs, individual creators and more, all coming together to create work that confront topical contemporary issues from land reform to women’s rights. In Mix Tape Memories, the Swedish cultural theorist Anders Høg Hansen highlights BLTX’s legacy, describing it as ‘. . . explicitly activist, political and socially conscious’. In light of this work, he determines: ‘Zines have become platforms vocalising what there was no space for in mainstream publishing avenues in the Philippines’.
Through all their activities—but particularly their efforts in the month of June—the organisation has echoed the more far-reaching sentiment in the country’s indie publishing, one that deems cultural work as inextricable from collective struggle. As David puts it: ‘Culture is humanity’s way of talking to itself. . . . There are no lost opportunities when we choose to fight for freedom’.
Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Greece
Two concerts and a poetic-musical event will be taking place at the Elytis House Museum this summer! The first concert took place on July 16, featuring several beloved songs based on the poems of Odysseas Elytis, and the poetic-musical event will take place on July 23 at the exhibition space Athyrmata, wherein excerpts from mostly Elytis’s poetry will be selected and performed along with fragments of contemporary compositions. The third event, a concert in the courtyard of the museum, will include French songs from musicals, operas, and films, along with Greek songs.
On July 17, Perivolaki Cooperative Café commemorated Giorgos Alexatos’s book on the life of activist Sotiris Petroulas with a discussion. The newly published work narrates the short life of the communist Petroulas, from his early childhood—when his family was persecuted for their participation in the Ethniko Apeleutherotiko Metopo (National Liberation Front) during the Axis occupation of Greece (1941-1944)—until his rise to prominence as a leader of the leftist youth movement, and his death on July 21, 1965. In telling Petroulas’s story, Alexatos is also narrating the story of 1960s Greece: the post-civil war (1946-1949) dominance of the right-wing state, the democratic, the class-social struggles of 1962-63, and the ongoing climate of left-wing prosecution until the coup of 1965.
Additionally, a new book by the Palestinian revolutionary and author Ghassan Kanafani was translated into Greek by Nasim Alatras and recently published by Salto Editions. Τhe book includes twenty of Kanafani’s short stories, and in an erudite accompaniment, Alatras provides necessary details on the places, people, events, and dates that appear in the tales, vis-à-vis the overall context of Palestinian history and resistance.
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