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BLED MEETINGS
The "Bled Meetings", as we like to call the international gatherings of writers organised every
year by the Slovene PEN Centre and the Writers
for Peace Committee of International PEN, have
been going on for four decades. The first meeting
was held on the initiative of writer and translator
Mira Mihelič, who at the time was president of
the Slovene PEN and later Vice-President of International
PEN, in Piran, a picturesque town on the Slovenian
coast in 1966, after the International PEN Congress
held a year before at Bled. A few years later
the meeting was moved to Bled, the place that
– after the greatest Slovenian poet France Prešeren
immortalised it in his poem The Baptism on the Savica – became the mythic town of Slovene literature.
Since the foundation of the Writers for Peace Committee of International PEN (Congress in Lugano in 1984), regular annual meetings of the Committee have also been taking place at Bled.
During the Cold War it was the Bled meeting that provided an open forum for a democratic dialogue between the writers from both the East and the West. "The Bled PEN" became a place of understanding, which was particularly manifest during the Balkan wars and during other tensions or political and even military conflicts, e.g. during the tragic events in Israel and the Palestine,
Since the beginning the organisers of the Bled meetings have striven – by carefully following the world events in the spiritual, cultural and literary spheres – to engage the participants into debates about topical issues, which are held in the form of at least three round-table discussions, one being dedicated to the endeavours of the Peace Committee of International PEN. The organisers particularly welcome the contributions of writers coming from places characterised by limited freedom of expression or violence of any kind. Bled was the place where writers from former Yugoslav republics could exchange their views while their countries were still at war; we listened to soul-stirring testimonies of Chechnyan writers, stories about the repressed Uygur nation and about Mayan intellectuals striving for cultural identity… Bled meetings provide a unique opportunity for writers and the wider public to hear writers belonging to cultures and creating literatures, which are not as well-known or are sometimes "censored" by the media.
The Bled conference has become one of the central annual events for the International PEN as well. It prides itself on being the oldest annual regional conference in the framework of the international writers’ organisation, and has become widely known as the place of dialogue and searching for common solutions to critical problems affecting writers' awareness and consciousness.
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