UNESCO-Cosmopolis Polyglot Literary Residencyfor Writers from the UNESCO Cities of Literature
The deadline has now passed. Please stay tuned for the announcement of our Resident-Elect!
Our 2026 Resident-Elect
Suji Kwock Kim
Suji Kwock Kim is an award-winning poet and playwright whose work explores war, migration, divided countries, family memory, and the possibilities of language. Her first collection, Notes from the Divided Country, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her later collection, Notes from the North, won the International Book & Pamphlet Competition. In 2026, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry.
Kim studied at Yale and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Fulbright Scholar in Korea, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Guardian.
During her Odessa residency, Kim is working on UTOPIA, INC., a book drawing on her family history, the lives of North Korean refugees, memories of war, and the possibilities of language that resists propaganda.
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. Residents will stay in privately rented apartments in Odesa’s historic centre, allowing them to experience the city as residents rather than visitors. 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 up to €350 ● accommodation in the historic centre ● a €500 stipend ● Health insurance● Introductions to Odesa's writers, publishers, translators, scholars, artists and other Cosmopolis Fellows and Residents● Opportunities to participate in public literary events
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.
This residency is made possible with the generous support of the Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature Office.
Any questions? Email moc.liamg%40erutaretilfoyticasedo