Applications are now open for ourOdesa Polyglot Literary Residency

For writers from UNESCO cities of literature: apply by 20 July

Together with the Odesa UNESCO City of Literature Office, we invite writers to spend up to one month in Odesa, one of Europe’s most singular literary cities. We offer accommodation, travel support, a subsistence stipend, and opportunities to engage with Odesa’s writers, translators, artists and publishers.
Today, in the shadow of war, Odesa continues to write, publish, translate, and defend the life of the mind.
We welcome writing samples in any language.

Ukrainian Cosmopolis

In Odesa — Ukraine’s humanist and cosmopolitan port city — Ukrainian Cosmopolis brings together thinkers, writers, and creators who resist attempts to control speech and thought. We are a civic and intellectual collective that regards the freedom to think and speak not as an intellectual luxury, but as a fundamental necessity of the very life for which Ukraine is fighting today.
We are the only organisation in Ukraine that openly challenges the new cultural and wartime orthodoxies that seek to regulate public speech while inadvertently reinforcing Russia’s hybrid propaganda. Resisting these tendencies is not only essential to Ukraine’s European future. It is a matter of survival.
At a time when freedoms are narrowing and people are leaving the country, we bring people to Odesa and preserve spaces for honest exchange. Through public dialogue and residency programmes, we help keep Odesa thinking and talking — and a free Ukraine still within reach.