The Chania Book Festival, organized by the Municipality of Chania in co-organization with the Region of Crete, returns for the fourth consecutive year in Chania, from Wednesday 25 to Sunday 29 June 2025, with the main theme “Our home, the planet”. With the participation of important Greek and foreign writers, publishers, translators, academics and intellectuals, panels on topical themes, both from the field of literature and society, as well as book presentations, the 4th CBF returns more dynamic than ever, at the Venetian Harbour of the city, between the Centre for Mediterranean Architecture and the Mikis Theodorakis Theatre.

This year’s programme will be launched with a special pre-festival event on Saturday 17 May 2025, at 20:00, at the Center for Mediterranean Architecture (Grand Arsenal), with the distinguished translator, author and professor at the Department of Translation Studies of the University of Connecticut, Peter Constantine, as the official guest.

Peter Constantine, born in London of an Austrian mother and an English father with Greek-Turkish roots, has been honoured with top international awards for his translation work (from 9 languages: modern and ancient Greek, German, Russian, French, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, Slovenian), which includes works by great authors such as: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Nicolo Machiavelli, Bernhard Schlinck, Thomas Bernhard, Günter Grass, Ismael Kantaret, Leo Tolstoy, Isaac Babel, Nikolai Gogol, as well as works of ancient Greek literature such as Sophocles. It is worth noting that he has also translated the poetic work Mother of the late Archbishop of Australia Stylianos Harkianakis, a native of Rethymno.

He co-edited, the important anthologies A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900-2000 (Cosmos Publishing, 2004) and The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (edited, in addition, by Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, Karen van Dyck, from Cosmos Publishing, 2004). W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), making a decisive contribution to the dissemination of Greek-language literature throughout the centuries to a wide international literary audience. Among other awards, he has been honored with the PEN Translation Award for Thomas Mann’s Six Early Stories and the US National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov.

The choice of Peter Constantine for the first event of the Festival underlines the importance that the Festival attaches to literary translation from and into Greek, both for the acquaintance of the Greek public with foreign literary trends and for the acquaintance of the international public with Greek-language literature. The adventure of translation work will therefore be given even greater emphasis in this year’s programme with special events.

During the event, the author will talk with the journalist and member of the Festival’s project team, Kyriaki Beioglu, on the occasion of the publication of his first novel The Bought Bride (Pataki 2025), based on the real story of the author’s Greek grandmother and her ordeal, which starts from a Greek village in the Caucasus, and will take questions from the audience. Nikos Kalogeris, Deputy Governor of Chania, Panagiotis Simandirakis, Mayor of Chania and Manolis Pimplis, Director of the Chania Book Festival will introduce the event.

See you on 17 May, for the launch of the programme, and in 6 weeks for the big summer appointment with books, translation and world literature!