Posts featuring Irene Zanol

European Literature Days 2024: The Twenty-First Century City and Countryside

April 7, 2025 | in Dispatches | by MARGENTO

City and countryside, war and peace, and the persistence of garbage.

Every year, European Literature Days transforms the Austrian city of Krens an der Donau into a lively, welcoming theatre for the celebration of contemporary writing, featuring readings, dialogues, workshops, and other cultural programming coordinated under a selected subject. The 2024 edition had the urban-rural complex as its central theme, and in the following dispatch, our editor-at-large MARGENTO reports on the events and conversations that took place.

Late last November, as I headed back to Krems-on-the-Danube to attend European Literature Days (Europäischen Literaturtage) for the second time, I realized that there was a need for me to both grasp the event’s larger context and to hone in on its details and nuances. This concurrence of conflicting scales requires starting this brief dispatch in media res, with a tour offered by the organizers on the third day of the festival. There, the guides Gregor Kremser and Max Dietrich took participants around town, unveiling multilayered histories and instances of reinscribing the past. The landmarks ranged from a park named for the anti-Nazi resistance fighter Therese Mahrer, to the only memorial (in Austria and Germany if not the world) dedicated to a WWII German military—ironically on the very eighty-sixth anniversary of the Reich’s genocidal pogrom.

European Literature Days 2023: Literature for a Better World

March 13, 2024 | in Dispatches | by MARGENTO

From the famed literary festival in Krems an der Donau!

Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.

The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts.

The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.