Μake us preferred on Google The 12th Athens International Poetry Festival will open Monday, September 28, bringing poets from Greece and around the world to the Athens Concert Hall for an evening of readings, music and visual elements.
The opening ceremony will begin at 7 p.m. in the Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall at the Athens Concert Hall, Greece’s major cultural venue. Admission is free with an online reservation, with a limit of two tickets per person. The event is being held in collaboration with the Poets’ Circle.
This year’s festival is titled “No Exit: Poems for Fractured Times,” placing poetry at the center of a broader reflection on a world marked by geopolitical tensions, challenges to democratic principles and the growing influence of artificial intelligence on perceptions of reality.
Poetry is presented not as a luxury, but a necessity: a means of reaffirming European identity, supporting democratic culture and promoting a humanistic education that gives meaning and quality to life.
The opening ceremony will feature poetry readings by Greek and international writers, bringing together the spoken word, images and music. The program aims to give voice to the collective anxieties of the present while also highlighting human tenderness and the persistence of hope.
Among the participating poets are Harold Alva Viale of Peru; Ilya Kaminsky and Alicia Stallings of the United States; Chiara Catapano of Italy; Andrea Cote of Colombia; Michael Krüger of Germany; James Byrne of the United Kingdom; Javier Bóthalongo of Spain; Tadeusz Dąbrowski of Poland; Merima Dizdarević of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Jelena Radovanović of Serbia; and Girgis Shukry of Egypt.
Greek participants include Giorgos Alisanoglou, Anna Afentoulidou, Theodoros Gonis, Dioni Dimitriadou, Sofia Dionysopoulou, Chloe Koutsoumbeli, Panagiotis Nikolaidis, Grigoris Sakalis, Lina Stefanou, Ilias Fragakis and Giorgos Chouliaras.
Ioanna Angelidi will present the ceremony, with Vasilis Papadopoulos on piano.
Beyond marking the official start of the festival, the ceremony is presented as an invitation to audiences to listen to the many languages and perspectives of the world—both literally and figuratively—through the voices of poets.
