What remains of childhood once the world starts falling apart? How do we speak about loss, closeness, and growing up when reality itself feels increasingly unstable? This year’s Women Talking series at Malta Festival will circle around those questions through literature that refuses to separate emotions from the world around us, showing instead how deeply intertwined they are.

Three writers with radically different voices and experiences will come to Poznań this June – from Anna Jadowska’s prose debut, through one of the most talked-about literary debuts of recent months by Tara K. Menon, to Samanta Schweblin, a master of the short form and one of the most important contemporary voices in Ibero-American literature.

The series will open with Anna Jadowska – filmmaker, screenwriter, and now novelist. Dadzieja is told from the perspective of a young girl slowly discovering the darker sides of the world around her. Jadowska brings her cinematic sensitivity into literature: a focus on emotion, rhythm, and everything left unsaid.

One of the major new voices of this year’s programme will be Tara K. Menon. Her debut novel Under Water, already sold to dozens of countries worldwide, tells the story of two girls whose lives are forever changed by the 2004 tsunami. It is a novel about closeness, grief, and a world whose fragility becomes impossible to ignore – themes that strongly resonate with this year’s performative programme at Malta Festival. 

The series will close with Samanta Schweblin – the Argentine writer whose books have become some of the defining works of contemporary Ibero-American literature. Her fiction moves between realism, tension, and subtle unease, while her latest collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, has just received one of the most prestigious awards in Ibero-American literature.

This year’s edition will also introduce a new format: a Book Rave built around Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count. Designed for those who want to experience literature in a more collective and intimate way, the event moves beyond the traditional division between stage and audience. The programme combines shared reading and listening sessions with a conversation between Michał Nogaś and translator Kaja Gucio, creating a relaxed, intimate atmosphere shaped around books, music and the presence of other readers. The starting point will be Adichie’s writing — work that for years has explored relationships, womanhood and the emotional dependencies of the contemporary world.

Women Talking is literature that does not try to silence reality. On the contrary — it makes it impossible not to hear it. 

To Love!