In partnership with the Odesa UNESCO City of Literature Office, we invite applications for the Summer 2026 Odesa Polyglot Literary Residency.
Writers from the UNESCO Cities of Literature are invited to spend up to one month in Odessa — Ukraine’s great Black Sea port and one of Europe’s most singular literary cities. Built on centuries of departures and arrivals, Odesa has long been a city of wit, freedom, and literary nerve. Here, writers have always turned hardship into style and friction into innovation. Historically polyglot and cosmopolitan, it remains quick-witted, irreverent, and restlessly alive.
Odesa's sea light, courtyards, grand staircases, and noisy streets have fed generations of writers since Babel. Today, in the shadow of war, the city continues to write, publish, translate, and defend free letters. It remains a place where language matters, writing remains necessary, conversation lives, and literature belongs in public.
The residency provides something rare: space and time to work and get to know Odesa’s literary community. It is designed as a time of creative freedom. Residents are free to use the time as they choose: to write, read, research, translate, walk the city, begin new conversations, or simply think. We ask for modest participation in the city's literary life: one or two public events, and a short reflective text afterward.
We offer
● Travel support from Europe● Accommodation in the historic centre● A €500 stipend● Introductions to Odesa's writers, publishers, translators, scholars, artists and other Cosmopolis Fellows and Residents● Participation in public literary events (optional but encouraged)● Health insurance
We accept writing samples in any language and will do our best to have them read by writers who speak them. Do, however, provide translations of work not written in English, Ukrainian or Russian. Submissions will be judged by the Odesa City of Literature Office together with members of Ukrainian Cosmopolis.