The main event of the year for readers — the Lviv Publishers’ Forum — took place on a day with a fateful number — Sept. 13. That is the exact number of years that publishers, book-selling organizations, and writers have been coming to the City of Lions in September. But this unlucky number did not jinx the forum’s success: nearly 600 participants from eight countries presented 400 books at the forum’s competition for best book.
More than 240 book launches were held in Lviv in the past few days. Publications from the Library of The Day, which are in great demand, were among the forum’s highlights. They were available at outlets of the private company Vatuliak.
The 2006 book forum has become both a traditional and innovative event. In the past there has been a lack of exhibition and presentation areas, and on Forum days you couldn’t drive through Lviv. The huge number of visitors has proved once again that we need new hotels and a large exhibition centre, which the authorities have promised to build by 2010. All this bustle and color are an approximation of what will be happening soon in Lviv, when the city celebrates its 750th anniversary. This general rehearsal has proved that we need to continue working.
But given the forum’s success, we can put up with all this inconvenience. A member of the competition jury, the well-known Ukrainian philosopher and writer Myroslav Popovych, told The Day:
“Today the book business is crucial for strengthening the Ukrainian language. It is useless to hope that we can improve the situation in Ukraine by any prohibitive methods or administrative interference. People should read because it is interesting for them to read. Today’s forum has attested to the rapid development of the book business, and the ideological formulation accompanying the forum deserves the greatest attention and respect.
“Today many fascinating people — writers and politicians — have come to the forum, and this is significant too. It was very difficult for us, the members of the jury, to choose the winners. The books that were presented here would be the jewel of any book fair. I personally singled out Yaroslava Melnyk’s book, which talks about Franko’s collection of apocrypha, and a book on Chinese grammar. One can only be amazed by the subtlety and tastefulness of the design and presentation of the material. The textbook was published by the small Lviv publishing house Decameron. I was looking at it and thinking with envy: I wish I had published a textbook on Ukrainian grammar like this.
“You can find many people in Ukraine who don’t know that Franko wrote books about the apocrypha. I for one didn’t know that they had been republished. Of course, this book is for professionals, but it deserves to be known by a wider circle of readers, because it is our treasure house.
“All this is proof of the victory of good taste. It is no longer possible to say that Ukrainian book production is marginalized. It is on the rise.
“This interview took place before the winners were announced, so it was gratifying to hear that these books were named among the forum’s best. The first prize went to Ivan Franko and the Biblia Apocrypha (Ukrainian Catholic University Press) for its groundbreaking research in the field of apocrypha and Franko studies.
“The forum’s special guest was Academician Ivan Dziuba, laureate of the State Taras Shevchenko Prize and Hero of Ukraine. His three-volume work From the Well of Years (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Press) won second prize. It was honored for its literary-critical and esthetic-cultural interpretation of an era. The Grand Prix was awarded to the book Ukraine and the Ukrainians: Ivan Honchar’s Historical-Ethnographic Art Album (Selected Pages) (Ivan Honchar Museum, Kyiv) — for its unique visual wealth and unexpected frankness of the representation of the Ukrainian nation’s historical-cultural identity.
“This year’s forum featured the first-ever International Literary Festival, organized by the Berlin Literary Colloquium, the Allianz Cultural Institute (Germany) and the Polish Institute of Kyiv. More than 40 writers from eight European countries — Austria, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine — were invited to take part in the festival. Creative meetings, discussions, literary readings and, of course, a night of poetry and non-stop music featuring Ukraine’s most popular poets, young authors, and the jazz-bands Dzyga-imagine and Chocolate gathered all the Ukrainian literary beau monde.
“A real treat for young Ukrainian readers was the Book Mania Festival of Children’s Reading, which traditionally takes place during the forum. Funds to organize the festival were provided by Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ukraine, the Lviv City Council, and Krok, the Lviv Region Businessmen’s Union. The Lviv Oblast Council thought it was important to help organize the Publishers’ Business Forum whose participants discussed prospects for developing the book market, and assessed its competitiveness and the quality of Ukrainian publications. The famous Ukrainian singer, Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, announced that he has started working on a serious advertising project aimed at supporting and expanding the reading audience, and the publication of a series of children’s literature, which will be distributed mainly free of charge.
