ILFU on the theme of fiction to the facts

This year's International Literature Festival Utrecht (ILFU) will take place from 23 September to 8 October, under the motto 'fiction to the facts'. The theme ties in with the online platform ILFU launched in April, for which 856 of the intended 1,000 members have now joined. The festival starts in the opening weekend with the NK Poetry Slam and the Utrecht Book Market on Vredenburg and ends two weeks later with the 39th edition of De Nacht van de Poëzie in TivoliVredenburg.

After two condensed and adapted editions during the corona pandemic, this year the festival hopes to return to a full two-week edition that will attract around 20,000 visitors analogous to the last pre-corona edition. The programme promises to be a great start to the new book season and includes a mix of great writers, new talent, classics, young adult, poetry, music, theatre and film.

The festival kicks off on 23 September with a grand literary opening event in the centre of Utrecht, followed a day later by the NK Poetry Slam. After two years, the Utrecht Book Market on Vredenburg Square will return. Other events during the two weeks that follow are the Young Adult event YALFU, the Belle van Zuylen lecture, various Book Talks with Dutch and international writers and programmes around the work of Maya Angelou and Ukrainian literature.

The second edition of Exploring Stories; a festival day on a variety of current, social issues highlighted in conversations between novelists and nonfiction authors. For new talent, the third edition of the ILFU story contest, for which stories can be submitted in the categories of prose, poetry, image, audio and spoken word. The festival closes with poetry: on 7 October with the Children's Night of Poetry, a poetry spectacle in the Utrecht Library, where children can spend the night with their parents in a tent among the books, and on 8 October the 39th edition of Night of Poetry.

In recent years, ILFU managed to snare big international names such as Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elena Ferrante, Michel Houellebecq, Nick Cave, David Mitchell and Édouard Louis. The lineup for ILFU 2022 will be announced in the coming months.

Ticket sales for The Night of Poetry and a number of other programmes start on Wednesday 15 June. See ilfu.com/festival for more info.