The Odesa – UNESCO City of Literature Office continues to build bridges between UNESCO Cities of Literature and Odessa, fostering dialogue, exchange, and shared literary experience across cultures.
In 2008, Melbourne joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network when it was designated the second City of Literature in the world. Melbourne’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature is acknowledgment of the breadth, depth and vibrancy of the city’s literary culture. Melbourne supports a diverse range of writers, a prosperous publishing industry, a successful culture of independent bookselling, a wide variety of literary organisations and a healthy culture of reading and engagement in events and festivals.
"Australia continues to stand in solidarity with Ukraine, offering humanitarian aid, military assistance, and strong diplomatic support in the face of ongoing aggression. This collaboration is part of a broader commitment to uphold democratic values, cultural resilience, and freedom of expression under extraordinary pressure," said David Ryding, the founding Director of the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office.
Please, meet Grace Yee.
Grace Yee is the author of Chinese Fish, winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry in Australia, and the Mary & Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Chinese Fish is published by Giramondo in Australia, and slated for publication with Akoya in the UK in 2026. Her second collection Joss: A History (also Giramondo) is out in June 2025. graceyeepoet.com
how to launch a poem
i) recall democracy is pretty numbers & orange clusters,
strategically bold and critically wet, intemperate type-c
photographs;
ii) advance stagger: inkjet-laboured nested griefs & hybrid
animals, radio waves & gaze-detail, yellow tableaux & charlie
foxtrot figments, clusterfucks;
iii) shoot east shoot west, strike a pose, teem prada, preoccupy
with night lights, sex and billboards, sex on billboards, belled
skirts & wasted chaste;
iv) grandscale the food you eat the way you eat the hell you eat,
immaterial bread in a hot-desk-metropolis-cum-umbrage, huff,
shirtfront a superpower;
v) manipulate sewer systems, decompress anomie in cinematic
frames, long exposures, far-flung procrastinations;
vi) tilt abs, beams & lunar grief, levitate laundry lists, fold &
stack;
vii) dispense the demerits of your own internal terrain, drain,
simulate the passing of witnesses, chrome, crack seizures,
flicker;
viii) suck sea-garbage, disorient the landscape, portrait
horizons, harvest documents, document contemplations,
posture downward dog and driverless;
ix) swing equanimity, aviate the neighbourhood, tourniquet
technologies and all judicial glosses, glow;
x) headlight corridors, tunnel frugal, agitate outages and
provisional liminal pipes, frack cooking cleaning stroking,
weed;
xi) foul the sounds of brooks & birds;
xii) keep the glue gun loaded and the bones cool and dense,
collate fruit & unbreakable eggs, texturise melamine, unsheathe
by the side of the road, surveil;
xiii) laminate absurdities, bait ceilings & subfloor spaces,
fibrillate the past, box the light there, salt the snow;
no more pre-school baby: my poetic practice requires periodic
sips of rescue, resuscitated drift, glycerine cocoons (stanzas of
childbearing & rooms of equal conviction), epsom salts & quiet
fridays, no jars of meh or party gummies, no cystic alienations,
no unnatural breath or bigotry or beef, no astringent grave
affect, but vanishing on waking, capes.
The project was created by the Odesa UNESCO City of Literature and being implemented with funds raised by Reykjavík Bókmenntaborg UNESCO as part of the readings initiated by Milano City of Literature “Not Just Words” (Reading for Odessa) on February 24, 2024.
