Miłosz Festival 2026

Miłosz Festival is the largest celebration of poetry in Poland and Central Europe. Each edition is visited by the stars of world literature, and Kraków’s conference rooms, auditoriums, small bookshops and festival cafés are transformed into a poetic space for dialogue – meetings with authors, lectures, concerts, workshops and discussions on pressing social, cultural and political issues. Each year at the event, the Wisława Szymborska Prize is awarded for the best poetry book originally published in Polish and for translation of poetry.

During the 2025 Miłosz Festival, we met poets from all over the world, including Penny Boxall and Harry Josephine Giles (Scotland), Jelena Glazova (Latvia), Ishion Hutchinson (Jamaica), Myroslav Lajuk and Viktor Melnyk (Ukraine) or Wayne Miller (United States), as well as a number of Polish artists.

The list of festival guests in previous years includes: Adonis, Yuri Andrukhovych, Simon Armitage, Kateryna Babkina, Saleh Diab, Elena Fanailova, Peter Gizzi, John N. Gray, Seamus Heaney, Stefan Hertmans, Anthony Joseph, Philip Levine, Agi Miszol, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Oswald, Maria Stepanova, Zadie Smith, Dubravka Ugrešić, Tomas Venclova.