Ocean Vuong receives Belle van Zuylenring and comes to Utrecht on 27 September

Proud and delighted we are: we may author and poet Ocean Vuong received at ILFU 2025. Vietnamese-American Vuong will receive this year's Belle van Zuylenring awarded, an international honorary prize for a writer's oeuvre with strong social commitment. Vuong will also deliver the accompanying Belle van Zuylen lecture.

Ocean Vuong is a star author whose work is a rare combination of literary beauty, social themes (migration, trauma, poverty, queerness) and emotional vulnerability. Vuong has a huge fan base around the world, including many young readers and people from the queer community.

The Belle van Zuylenring award committee characterises Vuong's work as "written close to the raw heart of life. Vuong writes about outsiders, loners and the desperate but at the same time about all of us: searching and longing in a fragmented world. With his tender-sharp pen, he pierces illusions and shows us that life is worth living, not in spite of pain and destitution but including them.' On the day Ocean Vuong launched the Belle van Zuylenring receive, on Saturday 27 September at TivoliVredenburg, he will also address the accompanying Belle van Zuylen lecture from. 

About Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong was born in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City, 1988) and fled to the United States with his parents and grandmother when he was two years old. There, Vuong grew up with his mother and grandmother, in poverty and at the bottom of society. Vuong's mother could neither read nor write, but her son would become the author of a global bestseller. 

Ocean Vuong made his debut with poetry. In 2016, his debut collection of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, with which he immediately won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Three years later, he published the novel that made him world-famous, On earth we shine for a moment (translated into Dutch by Johannes Jonkers, Hollands Diep, 2019). It is a novel in letter form, a letter to Vuong's Vietnamese mother, stuck in her war trauma. A story of alienation and survival, love and sex, memory and numbness in an inimitably individual style, polyphonic and multiform.

'That polyphony also ensures that it is not just a novel about Vietnamese refugees, or about homosexuality, or about poverty in America, or about a young writer finding his way - it is about all those things.' - Roos van Rijswijk in NRC.

 'The novel invites the reader to look precisely at what you might normally turn away from: at war traumas passed down from generation to generation, at the difficult reality of being non-white and trying to put down roots as a refugee in the United States, at the hopelessness that comes with poverty (razor-sharp in the denunciation of the way OxyContin is marketed), and at the struggle to (live) your queer identity in a stubbornly heteronormative culture.' - LA Review of Books

His successful novel was followed by his second collection of poems, Time is a Mother (2022), translated into Dutch by Onno Kosters as Time is a mother. Vuong wrote the collection after his mother's death, and once again it shows his great poetic power, his delicate take on the sensuous. A dreamy collection about life, loss and love, it definitively confirmed Vuong's position in the poetic firmament.

Vuong's latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness (The Emperor of Gladness, translated by Johannes Jonkers, Hollands Diep, 2025) is about the young, troubled Hai, who builds a special bond with a war-traumatised and demented old woman, Lithuanian Grazina. In recognisable Vuong-like fashion, the desolation of today's America, growing poverty and hopelessness are linked to an individual's hope and resilience. The Emperor of Gladness is an extremely tender novel, which has already been called "a potent antidote to potty masculinity" and "a paean to solidarity" in reviews. 

In addition to being a writer and poet, Ocean Vuong is a lecturer creative writing at New York University. He is an important icon for the queer community and has a huge global reach in it. 

About the presentation and lecture

Alderman for Culture Eva Oosters will present the Belle van Zuylenring to Ocean Vuong on 27 September. The presentation will take place at TivoliVredenburg in a programme starting at 20:00. After reading the award report, Ocean Vuong will deliver his Belle van Zuylen lecture. Afterwards, he will be interviewed by Roos van Rijswijk. Ticket sales for this programme start today, 13 August, via ilfu.com. Visitors to the programme will receive a special issue with the text of the lecture.

About the Belle van Zuylenring

Since 2019, the Belle van Zuylenring has been awarded during ILFU to international writers whose work reflects strongly on social themes. Previously, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Elena Ferrante and Svetlana Alexijevich received the ring, which is named after the internationally renowned Utrecht-based writer Belle van Zuylen (1740 - 1805), who placed a strong emphasis on equality and emancipation in her work. Her reputation as feminist-avant-la-lettre and fighter for freedom was nuanced in 2021 by the publication on Utrecht's slavery past that also examined how Belle van Zuylen, who never explicitly spoke out against slavery, related to her family's colonial fortune. The Belle van Zuylenring is an initiative of ILFU and is awarded in cooperation with the municipality of Utrecht. The award committee consists of Pete Wu (writer and journalist), Harminke Medendorp (ILFU Supervisory Board) and Mirjam van Hengel (ILFU programming).

ILFU 2025: 20 September to 4 October

The Belle van Zuylen lecture is part of ILFU literature festival, which this year takes place from 20 September to 4 October. ILFU is an international festival for all disciplines of literary culture. The opening weekend with Boekfest, the NK Poetry Slam and the Utrecht Book Market will be followed by two more weeks including Book Talks with international writers, the festival weekend Exploring Stories on literature & society, the Young Adult Festival YALFU and the 42^ste Night of Poetry. Throughout the year, you can take writing and literature courses at the ILFU Academy and performances and get to know new writers on the online ILFU Daily.