„Rabka Festival” – not Obvious Paths to the Book
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Rabka Festival, Rabka-Zdrój, children’s literature festival, children’s books, reading promotion
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The seventh edition of “Rabka Festival”, International Festival of Literature for the Young People, will take place from 8 until 11 July 2020.
Throughout its years of presence in the literary landscape of southern Poland, “Rabka Festival” has gained its faithful audience that comes from all directions to the mountainous town of Rabka-Zdroj to enjoy the event. “Rabka Festival” has become one of the favourites in the Polish literary world, and received a number of awards: 2019 “Translator’s Friend” from the Polish Literary Trans-lators Association, 2017 ibbybookfor promoting reading; Lesser Poland Brand Congress Award in 2018 as the event best promot-ing the region; an honorary mention in the “Lesser Poland: Great Discovery” plebiscite as well as the “Cultural Event of 2015” by the Kulturowy Gościniec, an eminent local ngo. The festiwal has been successful enough to secure grant funding from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage for many years in a row.
“Rabka Festival” and its growth 2014 2019
Budget 16 000 170 000
No of events 16 62
No of participants 250 3000
No of invited guests/artists 12 53
Rabka-Zdrój is a spa and a health resort catering specifically to the needs of young patients. Children from all over the country have been treated in the local sanatoriums since the 19th century. In sum-mer it becomes a destination of choice for the families that come to Rabka-Zdroj to take advantage of its mild climate, and enjoy the trek in the Gorce Mountains as well as all the city attractions honed to children’s interests: a puppet theatre, regional museums, an amusement park, rope parks, city park and various playgrounds.
Rabka-Zdrój is a unique place, where people tend to slow down, and where parents and grandparents find the time to spend with their children and grandchildren. As such it provides an ideal scenario, in which you can simply suggest a good book to the members of the Festival and encourage them to read it together.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that “Reading opens up the world”; it has been our motto from the very beginning, providing a simple framework to all our festival activities. The Festival takes place during the summer break, when school duties give way to the freedom and fun of the summertime. That is the reason why it has become an excellent educational lab, where play-based, fas-cinating, surprising and unorthodox ways of promoting reading are designed and tested, with avid participation from academic researchers, and with the support of the Faculty of Polish Stud-ies at Jagiellonian University that is our official patron. The usual workshop and meet-the-Author format is accompanied by literary experiments that we encourage. Our young festival participants enjoy all sorts of role-playing games and workshops, where they can “diy” literature. We make pottery, we sew, create theatre, put
together mobile apps for all kinds of literary purposes, record au-diobooks, films and write books.
“Rabka Festival” is not a one-time, in-and-out kind of an event, where the city becomes a temporary host to a throng of tired au-thors who rush in, present their work and hurry on. The Festival is actively present in the cultural landscape of the city throughout the year, and the local artists shine as brightly as the big stars from Poland and abroad.
The Festival goes out there, into the big world as well. We attend international book fairs (Bologna, Frankfurt, Prague), visit other literary festivals (Lund, Bath, Berlin, Münich) and children’s book centres (Bratislava, Tallinn, Hamburg), taking notes and learning, wherever we go. We invite artists from all over Europe: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Germany, Slovakia and Swe-den. It is very important to us that during our meeting the guests use diverse languages to speak to children, as it opens them up to other cultures and show how rich and varied the world is. We provide ample space to discuss the significance of translation in this respect; literary translators aid us in networking and com-municating with our foreign authors. In 2019 the Polish Literary Translators Association acknowledged our efforts by awarding the Festival with the title of “Translator’s Friend.”
The Festival is a space for families, but it also targets the audi-ences professionally connected with the book industry. Teachers, librarians, publishers, booksellers and reading promoters from all over Poland come to Rabka-Zdrój to participate in a series of talks and discussions on innovative ways of promoting reading; in their free time they observe the workshops and can draw inspiration for their own work. As a stay in the spa inspires leisurely network-ing, we have all been able to get to know each other; at one point it has turned out that basically all our professional participants implement their own projects aiming at reading promotion. That is why we have decided to establish “Zwyrtała” (the name of a re-gional folk character), a national award based in Rabka-Zdrój that
would go to the most innovative and inspiring reading promotion project. With this competition, we want to appreciate and reward those creative individuals that work ceaselessly with children and adults. Our other aim is to collect and disseminate ground-breaking ideas that have already been implemented in one place, and can provide inspiration in another. The outcome of the first edition was so good, and we gathered so many excellent ideas that we are going to continue with this competition and develop it further.
słowa kluczowe
Rabka Festival, Rabka-Zdrój, festiwal literatury dziecięcej, książka dziecięca, promocja czytelnictwa
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Iwona Haberny – absolwentka polonistyki i historii na Uniwer-sytecie Jagiellońskim. Założycielka Agencji Promocyjnej oko ist-niejącej od 2000 roku w Krakowie, prezeska fundacji Bookowy Dom. Laureatka nagrody „Książka Roku ibby 2017”, w kategorii „upo-wszechnianie czytelnictwa”. Prowadzi liczne projekty i szkolenia związane z niestandardowymi formami promocji czytelnictwa. Or-ganizatorka wielu wydarzeń kulturalnych, między innymi sześciu edycji Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Literatury Dziecięcej „Rabka Festival”, w ramach którego przyznawana jest nagroda „Zwyrtała” – za najlepszy pomysł promujący czytanie.