The Tbilisi International Literary Festival will take place for the 11th time this year, bringing together 12 authors from more than 10 countries around the world.
This year’s festival concept is “Memory as Resistance.”

Memory is not merely the recollection of things past, it largely determines who we are, how we understand the present, and what kind of future we are able to imagine. Authoritarian regimes seek to erase people, their histories, their names, their memory. Wherever memory is controlled, freedom itself stands in peril.

This year’s festival will bring together Georgian and international writers, poets, and translators to reflect, together, on the bond between memory, freedom, and literature. We believe that, despite every historical and political divide, literature carries out one and the same mission everywhere: it gives voice to those whose voices are being taken from them; it creates and safeguards a shared memory of struggle, defiance, and sacrifice.

A significant part of the festival will be devoted to contemporary Georgian documentary prose books that have held on to a particular time, a particular reality. Literature, documentary prose not least among it, strives to capture what is so easily lost in a world that keeps changing shape: the human experience of conflict, civic resistance, hope, and the fight for freedom.

A society that protects its memory protects its freedom.

Founded in 2015 at the Writer’s House, the Tbilisi International Literature Festival has become an essential part of Georgia’s cultural landscape and a unique event in the Caucasus. It fosters a vibrant exchange of ideas, nurtures cultural diversity, and positions Tbilisi as a regional literary hub. Each year, the festival hosts thematic discussions, book presentations, and encounters with Georgian and international authors, literary scholars, translators, and performers, offering audiences direct access to contemporary literary currents.

Over the past nine years, the festival has welcomed nearly 200 authors from more than 40 countries and staged over 300 cultural and educational events.
The past two years, however, have brought severe challenges. Political developments have inflicted lasting damage on the cultural sphere, with public institutions closing their doors to independent writers and artists. In 2024, the festival was organized under the auspices of PEN Georgia – an advocate for freedom of expression and the rights of writers, journalists, and artists. This marked the start of a new chapter: staged without state involvement, in alternative spaces, yet with undiminished spirit.

For the organizers, the 11th edition represents an urgent opportunity to amplify a voice of protest – within Georgia and beyond its borders. We hope this milestone festival will be remembered as a bold, inspiring moment in Georgia’s literary history, and as part of the nation’s continuing struggle for freedom.