From 12 to 18 July 2026, Drohobych will host the 12th International Bruno Schulz Festival. Every two years, this town on Franko’s native soil brings together admirers of Bruno Schulz’s work from Ukraine and abroad, turning into a space for dialogue on literature, art and its multicultural history.
According to the organisers, this year’s SchulzFest will feature an extensive programme, including discussions, author events, literary readings, performances by poets, prose writers, literary scholars and translators. Various venues across Drohobych will host art exhibitions, theatre productions, open-air events, concerts and film screenings. The festival aims to provide a platform for conversations about Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish relations and the town’s shared cultural heritage.
The festival will open with the Honoured Academic Prykarpattia Song and Dance Ensemble of Ukraine “Verkhovyna”, widely known as the artistic calling card of Franko’s region. The musical programme will continue with concerts by experimental formations: the Lviv band “Three Steps into the Night”, Oleh Kadanov, the duo Opla (Piotr Bukowski and Hubert Zemler), as well as Ola Bilinska and Iza Lamik performing Jewish songs.
At the opening ceremony of SchulzFest’26, contemporary Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan and renowned Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki will read their poetry. Meetings with artists will be coordinated by Monika Sznajderman and Paweł Pruhniak. Among the planned events is a discussion between Serhiy Zhadan and Adam Michnik on Polish-Ukrainian relations, a recording of which will later be broadcast by Radio “Karta”, as well as a conversation between Zhadan and Olena Huseynova about Bruno Schulz’s “republic of dreams” as a key to understanding Central and Eastern Europe.
The literary strand occupies an important place in the programme. The cycle “Poems in Shelters”, launched at the 2022 festival as a symbolic protest against the Russian-Ukrainian war, will continue. In Drohobych’s shelters, Ukrainian authors Oleksandr Boychenko, Taras Prokhasko, Yuriy Andrukhovych, Oleksandr Mykhed, Anna Gruver, Olha Olkhova, Yeva Rayska and Liuba-Paraskeviya Strynadiuk will read from their work.
The festival will also feature the premiere presentation of the Ukrainian edition of Serhiy Zhadan’s book “My Schulz”. Guests will hear works by Halyna Kruk, Hryhoriy Semenchuk, Ostap Slyvynsky, Tomasz Różycki, Jacek Podsiadło, Marcin Sendecki, Alfred Wierzbicki and other authors. Among Polish writers, Anna Nasiłowska, Sylwia Chutnik, Katarzyna Kuczyńska-Koschany, Andrzej Stasiuk and Ziemowit Szczerek have confirmed their participation in the events in Drohobych.
The organisers are preparing two panel discussions: “Paths of Imagination: Schulz – Vogel – Ficowski” and “Café Europe: Small Centres of the World”. Participants will include Myroslav Marynovych, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Marek Zaleski, Keti Kantaria, the translator of Bruno Schulz’s works into Georgian, and Italian Polish studies scholar and translator Francesco Cataluccio.
The theatre programme of SchulzFest’26 will also be rich and varied. Madrid’s “Cambaleo Teatro” will come to Drohobych for the second time with the production “The Sound of Imaginary Numbers” and a joint “work in progress” project with Drohobych’s “Alter” theatre. Audiences will see the play “Antenna” by the “Rozbark” theatre from Bytom, directed by Maciej Gorczyński and based on the poetry of Serhiy Zhadan. Director Paweł Passini is preparing the premiere of an original production in landmark locations around Drohobych, and the Lviv Academic Regional Yuri Drohobych Music and Drama Theatre will present a monodrama.
On the festival’s opening day, there will be exhibition openings, and the shows will run until the end of July 2026. For the first time, the public will see drawings by Serhiy Zhadan – his debut as a visual artist. Piotr Tymochowicz, winner of the Leon Wyczółkowski painting competition, will present his cycle “Legacy of the Past”. Artist and film director Anna Kuśmierczyk will show her series “Numerical Collages”, and watercolourist Bartłomiej Michałowski will present the cycle “Towards the Bright Band of Dawn”.
Artist Vlodko Kaufman – artistic director of Lviv’s “Dzyga” and a promoter of contemporary Ukrainian art, who has been involved with SchulzFest for two decades – will also take part in the festival. A separate event will be a one-day showing of Edward Dwurnik’s famous drawing “Polish Nike”.
The organisers have also announced the screening of a trailer for a film about Bruno Schulz and Drohobych, created in collaboration with artificial intelligence. More detailed information about the festival programme can be found at brunoschulzfestival.org and polcentrumdro.org.