 Mar 6 2025 - Nov 17 2025

 Nova Gorica, Gorizia

Acclaimed writers, poets and philosophers will be exploring the challenges of democracy and borders at the Festival of Complexity, a series of events running in Nova Gorica and Gorizia until November as part of the European Capital of Culture.

The festival will open with a talk by the Sarajevo-born Croatian author Miljenko Jergović, the 2024 Vilenica Prize winner, at the Gorizia Culture Home (Kulturni Dom) on 6 March and at the Nova Gorica book and coffee shop Maks the next day.

Comprising four major strands and a series of smaller events, the festival relates to the Ljubljana Manifesto on Higher-Level Reading, launched as Slovenia featured as the guest of honour at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair.

The festival will address a range of topics, issues facing people in border areas and beyond, multilingualism, the relationship between minority and majority languages, the relationship between being on the margins and being central, between rural and urban, as well as the themes of war, peace-building and the environment.

The authors of the Ljubljana Manifesto, Miha Kovač, Adriaan van der Weel and Andre Schüller-Zwierlein, and other guests will discuss the importance of deepened reading for personal development and for democracy, at a panel debate in Nova Gorica on 12 March.

On 22 March, authors Sebastijan Pregelj (Slovenia), Nada Gašić (Croatia) and Federica Marzi (Italy) talk about writing in the shared area of the North Adriatic.

In the second section between late May and early June the festival will host Bulgarian-born author Kapka Kassabova, who writes in English and Bulgarian, and Igiaba Scego, an Italian writer, journalist and activist of Somalian descent.

The programme's centrepiece will be the 10th edition of the City of Books festival, from 29 August to 6 September. The festival will also see several philosophers, France's Didier Eribon, Italian Franco Bifo Berardi and Austrian Robert Pfaller.

The November section will feature a conference of Eurozine, a European network of cultural journalists and associations, to discuss different aspects of translation with several international intellectuals, including Slavoj Žižek.

The festival will also focus on literatures in minority languages, like those written by the Catalans, the Slovenian minority living between Istria and Gorizia, and ethnic groups on the British Isles.

It will also host Davide Toffolo, the author of Italian Winter, a graphic novel about the deportation of Slovenians to fascist camps, as seen through the eyes of children. Toffolo will also perform his eponymous music and comic strip recital in Nova Gorica.