The other writers' festival: four days in January dedicated to writers from the most unexpected corners of the world. We are experiencing Winternachten.
How do you get back home mentally after a war? David van Reybrouck in conversation with Stefan Hertmans and Ian Buruma Carrots, potatoes, maybe some celery and a dash of lard, this was the monotonous winter diet of the underclass in rural Flanders in the late nineteenth century. But, outlines professor and guest speaker Louise O. Fresco in her opening column, these days it is the...
He had had a TED training. It couldn't be otherwise. Bart Moeyaert, poet, writer and multiple award winner, sometimes literally wriggled into numerous corners to warm up the Dutch literary guild to his plans for 2016. That year, for the first time in a long time, the Netherlands will host the Frankfurter Buchmesse again, the Art Basel of the literary world....
'Do you not agree with me that many of you - like members of Roman Catholic curia - are already trying to make yourselves immortal and indispensable? That you are suffering from severe mental and spiritual petrification?' Kees 't Hart measured himself a papal role on Sunday 18 January, when delivering The State of Dutch Literature,...
Radbraken. This is how it works: you tie someone to a sturdy cartwheel, then break all his or her bones by beating them country-wide with clubs, after which you weave the mangled limbs around the spokes of the wheel. It is essential that the punished person undergoes all this alive and conscious. After the treatment, you bring the wheel with...
Rarely have I seen two female artists at a table more different from each other than Dominique Goblet and Leela Corman. Two female comic artists, on either side of Peter Breedveld who is flown in every year as a connoisseur of the comic genre at Writers Unlimited. Corman, a comic book artist as well as a dancer, writes her stories in a fairly recognisable style. Impressive stories, historically, like her latest...
Writers Unlimited's Friday night kicked off with an Islam debate. In no uncertain terms, religious historian Karen Armstrong argued that Islam and jihad are not the same thing. There are only 41 jihads in the entire Quran, most of which are the peaceful struggle to help the poor when one is destitute oneself. But after the Paris attacks...
Nii Ayikwei Parks wants to write a book describing bad places in Africa as ideal, so that people who use his books as travel guides will be mugged and robbed and thus will learn what fiction is. With this humorous statement, the British-born and British-based writer, who spent his childhood with his Ghanaian parents in Ghana, brings some air into the evening...
Home is where The hell is. The naming of Writers Unlimited's programme sections leaves little to the imagination. And listening to the opening of this particular section, writer Maaza Mengiste is not one to leave us with pleasant thoughts either. She has plunged literarily into the plight of refugees coming from Ethiopia to...
20 years of Writers Unlimited's existence, and the anniversary, now in The Hague, comes at a time when free writing worldwide is under heavier pressure than ever. Perhaps that is also why the audience is more numerous than previous editions. All nights are rigidly sold out, making for a rather sweltering atmosphere at the Theater aan het Spui. Apt opening of...
"Everyone who writes will sooner or later run into a wall, a limit of what cannot, should not and should not be written. And almost everyone will flinch at that moment and refrain from writing it. Because that wall is there to protect us from what we don't want." Karl Ove Knausgård, already compared by some to Marcel Proust,...
"Of course she can write!" seems the mother of the award-winning South African poet Antjie Krog ever having exclaimed. "Because I can do it too, right? There's nothing special about that."
Blood creeps, even for Krog. After a ten-year career as a successful architect - and secretly grinding on words - her own son debuted Andries Samuel with the crushing, heartbreaking collection of poetry Wanpraktyk (2011).
Writers Unlimited brought mother and son together on stage. Late at night. For the first time ever. And Wende sang to them. And god almighty how beautiful that was. By the way, you have to take it from us, because on pain of caning, pitch & feathers and fines from here to Siberia, it turned out that it was forbidden to film Wende singing (but we did, and the film was online for a while, but has now been removed from the internet).
Sometimes a Writers Unlimited programme can catch you off guard. Last year, the late-night talk show on literary sex was a hilarious highlight - pun intended - of the festival. This time, the programme dropped Let's talk about sex bar little to laugh at.
Forget the connotations with Salt N Pepa. Indonesian Linda Christanty writes not about 'happy sex, but about bitter sex as a means of power, as a form of coercion and violence.' That made us quiet for a moment.
Fouad Laroui does not do internet. The Moroccan-born author and professor does not even have a mobile phone. "I realise that this makes me part of a small elite," he declared during a debate at Writers Unlimited, "but I don't see the point of it." His tablemates did not share his opinion, which is quite remarkable. Just a few years ago, most of the international writing elite regarded social media as something with which they did not need to interfere.
Writers like to talk, and people like to talk about, with and through writers. As much as that may be reason to organise a literature festival, it is also why
At 1 strip or 1,000 words blogger and columnist Peter Breedveld spoke to three influential illustrators, Barbara Stok, Peter van Dongen and Thé Tjong-Khing using projected images from their beautiful work. The relaxed conversation was a breath of fresh air among the other ferocious debating violence at the festival.
"We don't use social media because it's cool," says Tunisian internet activist Sami Ben Gharbia. "But in a dictatorship, it is the only way to inform people about what is really going on. To fight the demons in society. I am not a techny Became because it's fun. I just needed useful knowledge about internet codes, to improve my civic activism possible."
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