UNESCO Cities of Literature annual conference in Tartu, Estonia 2026
The 2026 Annual Cities of Literature Conference was hosted by Tartu, Estonia between 11-15 May. This was the largest conference to date: 57 delegates from 40 cities. This included representatives from new Cities who joined the network in October 2025: Aberystwyth (Cymru), Celje (Slovenia), Conakry (Guinea), Gdańsk (Poland), Kahramanmaraş (Türkiye), Lund (Sweden) and San Luis Potosí (Mexico).
The Annual Conference is intended to strengthen understanding and connections between Cities to build greater future collaboration and to explore the literary life of the host city.
In a packed itinerary over the course of five days, delegates got to visit many important venues such as the Tartu Literature House, the Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu Public Library and Aparaadithas culture factory and meet programmers, writers, booksellers, archivists and librarians.
The Conference included a showcase of contemporary Estonian writers presented by the literary magazine EstLit alongside many other talks, poetry readings and cabaret performances. Also launched during the conference were Bus Poetry, displaying poems from 32 Cities of Literature in Tartu public buses, and Toponymy, an outdoor exhibition produced by Québec City in 2023, now shown in Tartu, that tells the stories behind city names across the network.
In addition delegates met Kerli Gutman-Normak, Head of the Estonian National Commission for UNESCO to learn more about the UNESCO sites in the country and to visit Viljanidi, City of Crafts and Folk Art in Southern Estonia.
The next Cities of Literature Annual Conference will take place in Okayama (Japan) in 2027, and Manchester (United Kingdom) in 2028.
