Vilenica International Literary Festival is a festival dedicated to literature that was founded in 1986 in Slovenia. It takes place annually in several locations on the Karst Plateau in the Slovene Littoral, including inside Vilenica Cave. It is arranged by the Slovene Writers' Association together with the Cultural Centre Vilenica from Sežana. The highlight of the festival is the awarding of the Vilenica International Literary Prize to a Central European author for "outstanding achievements in the field of literature and essay writing."

Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter. He was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." Handke is considered to be one of the most influential and original German-language writers in the second half of the 20th century.