Skopje, 22 August 2024 (MIA) — The 63rd Struga Poetry Evenings festival's Golden Wreath winner, French poet and playwright Jean-Pierre Siméon, will plant a tree sapling at the Poetry Park and read his poems ahead of the official opening of the festival Thursday evening.

As is SPE tradition, the opening ceremony will be held at Miladinov Brothers Culture Center where Konstantin Miladinov's “Longing for the South” will be read and the festival fire will be lit. The international poetry reading titled "Meridians" will follow.

In addition to the festival's laureate Siméon, German poet Katrin Pitz, who won the UNESCO-sponsored 2024 Struga Bridges award for a debut poetry collection, will read her poetry during the event.

Foreign poets reading on the stage will include Bengt Berg from Sweden, Anna Hoffman from Germany, Gökçenur Çelebioğlu from Turkey, and Galsansukh Dejidmaa from Mongolia.

This year's festival Miladinov Brothers award winner Katica Kjulavkova, who won the prize for best Macedonian poetry book published in the previous year, will also read her poems.

The festival programming will offer numerous poetry readings dedicated to its award winners as well as the traditional reading of the the laureate's poetry at Ohrid's St. Sofia Church.

The SPE, under the motto "The Touch of Beauty" in honor of the Braille system of writing for blind persons, will run through Aug. 25. mr/