Bergen is the rainiest town in Europe. Is that why it has brought forth so many famous writers? Tomas Espedal is from there; Karl Ove Knausgård, his most famous student, spent years there. We visit Norway, the special guest at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

At the Rheingau Musik Festival, the Bochabela String Orchestra performed "Long Way to Freedom“, a programme which paid hommage to Nelson Mandela. The orchestra's musicians hail from South Africa's townships. Arts.21 went to go see them.

Boris Mikhailov chronicled the decay of former Eastern bloc countries in starkly documentary images, yet his work remained largely unpublished until the 1990s. Today, he is one of the leading contemporary photographers of the post-Soviet generation.