Vorba le Romengi – Roma am Wort – The Voice of the Roma

International meeting of European Roma authors on the

The Cologne Declaration

Part I

We, Roma authors from eight European countries, who met in Cologne on November 17th – 19th at the invitation of Deutsche Welle, have decided to found an international association of Roma authors.

The association will be established at an inaugural meeting to be held in Helsinki in July 2002.

In order to prepare the inaugural meeting a working group has been established. The following authors are members of this group:

Veijo Baltzar, Finland

Lick Dubois, France

José Heredia Maya, Spain

Mariella Mehr, Italy

Jovan Nikolic, Germany

Margita Reiznerová, Belgium

Alexian Santino Spinelli, Italy

The object of the association is to protect the interest of Roma authors and to bring their literary work, irrespective of the language in which it is written, to public attention.

We wish to contribute to strengthening the awareness of Roma culture by our own community, to promote literary creativity and to establish Romanès with its numerous variants as a modern literary language.

The Cologne Declaration

Part II 

The following publishers attending the meeting in Cologne decided to create a Roma Library by publishing literature by Roma authors: University of Hertfordshire Press (United Kingdom), Wallada (France), Drava (Austria). We are looking for publishers in other countries that wish to join this initiative. The Roma library will be published in Romanès and other European languages.

Our goal is to provide an opportunity for Roma literature to be published and read throughout Europe so that it will be recognised as a part of world literature.

The success of this programme will depend very much on our ability to obtain the financial support of national and international institutions and of private sponsors.