Last night, the three-day extravaganza that is Festivali i Këngës culminated with the crowning of the winner of the 60th edition: Ronela Hajati, who will represent Albania at the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in Turin with the song “Sekret”.

For FiK nerds (very much including us), Tuesday’s second night was perhaps the highlight of proceedings, as FiK celebrated its 60th birthday by inviting former winners and stars from editions dating back to the 1970s to join this year’s participants on stage and duet on their entries – including an already legendary performance by Kastro Zizo and Justina Aliaj which you can enjoy again here:

But, of course, the real business was the selection of the FiK 60 winner – and last night, the votes of a seven-member jury panel (including reigning champion Anxhela Peristeri) decided that Ronela Hajati will get the ticket to ESC 2022.

With two finals already done and dusted, we are already looking forward to SongHunt 2022, our contest to find the best non-winning national finalist of the season. Our chatters’ votes on the Czech and Albanian selections have been added to the newly published results list here. If you disagree with their taste, you’ll just have to come along to the #esc chat and vote in the next shows to make sure your favourites make it into our heats when the competition begins later in the season!

In the meantime, here’s the 2022 Albanian entry for you to enjoy one more time. Note that it already features some English lyrics as well as several instrumental sections that could easily be trimmed, so there shouldn’t be too much for the revamp team to worry about!

Elsewhere in the wider Eurovision universe, we gathered in the chat to enjoy the 2021 edition of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. An excellent show from Paris culminated in an exciting public vote reveal, with Armenia ultimately coming out on top.

You can watch the winning song, “Qami Qami” by Maléna, below – and despite a patchy record in the adult ESC recently, Armenia have already announced that they will be hosting JESC 2022, which is nice to hear!

Turning our eye back to ESC 2022, you can now listen to all the contenders from Spain on the official site here.

And while we don’t have the actual songs yet, the broadcasters in Slovenia and Croatia have announced the participants in their respective national finals. There are many familiar faces in the line-ups, including 2017 and 2018 runners-up BQL in the former and several recent Dora performers in the latter.

Next up on the live show calendar is the Lithuanian and Norwegian heats in January – and we’ll be back with another update as countries keep announcing their plans for next year!

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