The founding session of the Maghreb Festival of Popular Poetry was opened in Tataouine on May 31, 2024, with a poetry evening hosted by the Gladidat Palace in the Beni Bilal region (about 8 km from the city of Tataouine), in which a large number of poets from within the country and from Libya, Algeria, and Palestine participated.
This evening attracted a large number of residents of this region and from various delegations of the region, men, women and children, who followed various poetic performances whose contents varied in complete harmony with the distinguished architectural space that hosted them.
This session of the Maghreb Festival of Popular Poetry was officially opened on the morning of Saturday, May 1, 2024, at the Cultural Complex, where an intellectual symposium was launched under the title “Poetry of Resistance in the Popular Heritage,” during which a number of professors gave interventions on popular poetry, including an intervention by the Algerian Dr. Ahmed Zoghb, followed by a competition in popular poetry. About “The Free Poet and the Pride of the Nation,” which is expected to continue this evening with the participation of more than twenty poets from Tunisia and abroad.
The Arts Square witnessed a diverse activity, during which the guests of the region visited an exhibition of traditional crafts and participated in a reconnaissance trip to a number of archaeological sites (Chenni, Doueirat, and the Blacksmith’s Palace,,,), while the popular poetry audience had a second evening in the Burj space in the Raqbah region of the Southern delegation of Tataouine.
The program of this first session concluded on May 2, 2024, with a folk poetry workshop for beginners, followed by free poetry readings, the final results were announced, and prizes were distributed to the winners.
