The Ljubljana UNESCO City of Literature is thrilled to announce the results of the call for applications for the international Writer in the Park residency program. The selection committee carefully reviewed 80 applications from over 30 Cities of Literature and selected Catherine Dorion (Québec City) and Louise Nealon (Dublin) as the two invited residents. Additionally, as an unforeseen short-term stay became available, Leander Steinkopf will be hosted as part of the impromptu Preface in the Park subproject.
The selection committee praised the remarkable overall quality of the applications. The Ljubljana UNESCO City of Literature office and the selection committee greatly appreciate the efforts of all applicants and recognize how they contribute to the international appeal of this residency. As always, selecting only two—though, as it happened, three—candidates was an extremely difficult task, and the office regrets having to turn down so many promising applications from fascinating authors.
Catherine Dorion (1982) is a critically engaged cross-disciplinary artist, active in literature, slam poetry, documentary filmmaking, and theater. She has written several plays, participated in many collective literary works, and published four successful books (including poetry, a youth novel, and memoirs). From 2018 to 2022, she served as an elected Member of Québec’s National Assembly for the Taschereau electoral district (downtown Québec City)—a self-described “anti-system poet-activist at the heart of the system.”
Currently, Catherine Dorion is working on a hybrid, genre-defying book, permeated by an inquisitive examination of the “violence of the dominant.” Written in the style of an intimate diary, it will include “reminiscences of other eras and stories in history where certain people lived—and wrote about—intimate lives disrupted by a failing era.” Dorion’s creative focus lies on our own era, one marked by the hardening of power and a tangible increase in social and political tensions. The book will also include stories drawn from the past: of Dorion’s grandmother, who fled the USSR during Stalin’s purges; of her daughter’s paternal grandmother, who fled Pinochet’s Chile in the 70s; and of other ancestors who experienced repression in Québec.
Louise Nealon (1991) is a fiction writer whose debut novel, Snowflake (2021), was chosen for the One Dublin One Bookcampaign and has been translated into several languages. Her second novel is forthcoming in 2026. In Ljubljana, Louise Nealon will be working on her third novel.
“We live in a world where we treat each other like things that can be canceled, like a restaurant order or a television series,” Louise Nealon says. Observing that in countries where it is most dangerous to be a woman, feminism is derided as a Western fairy tale, Nealon is struck by the “clumsy naivety” of oblivious men and women “who try their best to articulate the injustice in their lives, without realizing the consequences of speaking so candidly, even in the most liberal of societies.”
Noting that even though the binaries of man and woman are shifting and sexual politics have never been more fraught, patriarchy remains. “Fiction,” Louise Nealon says, “remains a refuge for those of us who seek to ask questions about who we are and who we can be.”
A Preface in the Park
This year, the Ljubljana UNESCO City of Literature office is pleased to announce that an additional writer with strong ties to Heidelberg, Leander Steinkopf, will be hosted for an unscheduled short-term stay at Švicarija.
Leander Steinkopf (1985) is an essayist, novelist, and speechwriter with a doctorate in psychology. He has authored and edited several books. His short stories have been published in esteemed literary magazines, and his essays in well-known dailies such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Having lived in various cities, including Berlin, Sarajevo, and Plovdiv, he has received numerous working grants and been invited to literary residencies.
Through these different literary forms, Leander Steinkopf aims to “capture the present, draw attention to details, and diagnose the contemporary human condition.” His current projects include a book-length essay on the challenges of liberal thinking in Germany, a radio essay on the aesthetics of the super-rich, a nearly finished bohemian novel set in Munich, and a novel about the rejuvenation of a long-term relationship—a journey into the past that takes place over the course of a single summer morning.