The Festival Pass: Your Complete Experience of CITF 2026

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is one of Russia's greatest living writers, a dramatist and fiction author born in Moscow in 1938 whose work was suppressed during the Soviet era for its unflinching depiction of ordinary Russian life, suffering, and resilience. Her plays — including Three Girls in Blue, Love and other disturbances, and numerous one-act pieces — deal with the darkness and absurdity of Soviet and post-Soviet existence with extraordinary compassion and dark humour, and have been performed at theatres worldwide. Her prose fiction, including the story collection There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby, has been translated into dozens of languages and introduced her work to international readers. Her appearance at the Pattihio Theatre in Limassol brought one of Russian literature's most important voices to Cyprus.

Vera Polozkova is a Russian poet and performer born in Moscow in 1986, widely regarded as the most important poetic voice of her generation in Russia. She first gained widespread attention through her personal blog in the early 2000s, which attracted hundreds of thousands of readers and established her as a phenomenon in the Russian literary landscape. Her poetry — passionate, intimate, and shot through with vivid imagery — speaks to themes of love, identity, loss, and the experience of contemporary womanhood. She performs her poetry live with musical accompaniment, creating shows that combine literature and performance in uniquely powerful ways. Her appearance at the Pattihio Theatre in Limassol brought Russian poetic culture to one of Cyprus's most important theatrical stages.