Budapest Transfer is an interdisciplinary arts festival with its main focus on contemporary literature. Each edition explores a theme through which we look at literary life in a regional and international context. The theme also provides the backbone of the programme that is designed to be interesting and accessible not only for literature enthusiasts but for the general public as well. Transfer Festival takes a special interest in exploring and promoting literature and authors of the Visegrad region.

Since 2006 Transfer Festival presented over 120 Hungarian and 60 international authors coming from more than 20 countries. In 2015 with over 20 partner institutions we realized 28 programmes in different downtown locations with the Petőfi Literary Museum (PIM) as our headquarters.

The ninth edition of the festival zooms in on the future, our hopes and fears connected to it, how writers perceived it and how our contemporaries write about it. We look at a world balancing on the verge of spectacular scientific progress and ecological collapse, amazing wealth and security and suffering and poverty. We explore the blurring line between human and machine, fact and fiction, prophecy and scientific forecast. We invite authors and scientists to discuss what the future holds for the arts, for literature, for mankind, for us?

The main aim of the four-day festival is to turn literature into an experience, as well as to acquaint the audience with creative artists and authors. Budapest Transfer provides a comprehensible channel towards present-day literature, popularizes reading as an activity, and enables meeting with prominent and promising authors. It puts literature in context, focusing on writing and other branches of the arts. In co-operation with various partners, PIM stages round-table talks, concerts, urban walks, as well as playful treasure-hunts and a range of other programmes. New ways of presentation are sought in Budapest so as to address the potential readership of our time, for the festival establishes a dialogue between literature and the world at large. This objective is furthered by the international layout of Budapest Transfer, introducing both Hungarian and foreign creators to the broader public.

Let your imagination run wild!

Open call for prose, poetry, drama, articles, drawings, comic strips from HA!art.

Ha!art Issue 57: UTOPIAS/ DYSTOPIAS

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 made its way to Amazon’s bestseller list and the demand for classic dystopian novels has increased dramatically.

And since the publication of those novels several decades ago, which viciously critique their times, their message seems to have been prophetic, having particular resonance today. However, the present reality in Poland and Central Europe even seems to surpass, at times, the wackiest visions known to us from film or literature. Since utopias, anti-utopias and dystopias have burst out of literary theory handbooks, not to mention literary works themselves, and permeated our reality, what we’re proposing is a little experiment. Imagine an even stranger scenario: say Poland and the world spin a reality so insane that it makes our current problems seem like child’s play. Or, on the contrary, imagine that the ridiculed and abandoned dreams of utopia come true before our very eyes. Dress the fears, desires and traumas of today in a futuristic suit, and try to trace the consequences of our present dreams and errors.

We are open to a variety of genres – prose, poetry, drama, articles and pieces of journalism, as well as drawings, comic strips and graphic pieces. As always, we will be grateful for an accessible form and limited number of footnotes. Translations of works into Polish are also welcome. Although we are mainly interested in our own backyard, i.e. Central and Eastern Europe, we will accept anything which breaks out of the mainstream and is not another variation on already well-known figures and works. We are waiting for your texts and translations until May 20, 2017. Send your works to poczta.literacka@ha.art.pl with “UTOPIA” in the title of the e-mail.

P.S. We reserve the right to contact only chosen authors.

Finally it has arrived!

See the programme brochure of this years festival here. Next week we are coming!

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