Je Maintiendrai. Holland's motto of arms ('Ik zal handhaven') adorns the beautiful hall of Utrecht's old Post Office, now Library. The motto also watched over the premiere of the performance 'Solomon's Judgement' with which Ilay den Boer now returns to the public. After all, he was not here for a while. He worked for just under a year at the IND, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service,...
Talent is often developed thanks to considerable opposition. Rodaan Al Galidi got talent for life thanks to more opposition than a white, former blonde Dutchman like me will ever meet. He escaped from Iraq and then spent years in the purgatory of the IND and COA, the abbreviations that define the border of the Netherlands. He wrote down what he...
She is 14, heavily veiled and bespectacled, with a voice that can be heard in the farthest corners of The Hague. She wants to be a surgeon but first she wins the preliminary round of the school competition for young poets at Winternachten. What anger there is in that person. What maturity sounds from her cry...
From 18 January, The Hague will be all about Winternachten. We think this is the most fun literature festival in the west of the Netherlands. This year, it is about Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, the motto of the French Revolution, among other things. But also about Karl Marx. Under the motto 'we the people', Winternachten is therefore about populism and secession,...
'In schools, you have to feed children literature like they feed geese in France.' With his witty remarks, Tommy Wieringa got the laughs as he lay on the sofa as the personification of the Netherlands with psychiatry professor Damiaan Denys. 'The Netherlands on the sofa' was one of the first programmes of the Saturday evening literary festival Winternachten in...
Next time, there will be 10 people queuing for a hotseat, 100 online viewers and dozens of live spectators in the foyer. At least I hope so, because only then will experimenting with new forms, apps and devices make sense, of course. At the second Winternachten night, Saturday 16 January at the Theater aan het Spui, we had slightly fewer viewers than...
Lots of audience and wonderful stories made the Saturday of the literary festival Winternachten a party. For the visit of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård in the afternoon, queues stretched from the auditorium to the front door of the Theater aan het Spui. The festival's evening programming was also well attended. While American-German philosopher Susan Neiman spoke in...
Three and a half hours of streaming video from a seating area at The Hague's Winternachten festival. I won't blame you if you didn't follow everything. I wasn't quite there myself at the end. Still, it was a success. If only because it hasn't been done here in the country before. Blab is so new that...
Hello Darkness is the theme of the international literary festival Winternachten, this coming weekend in The Hague. It takes guts, in a time when everything has to be fun and cosy and we prefer not to spend our free time dealing with misery or 'heavy topics'. That is why we love Winternachten, because that festival really goes...
Propaganda is not just something that occurs in, say, Russia, but also in the West - more so than we ourselves realise. For example, is it widely believed today that the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan to capitulate and thus end World War II, nothing could be further from the truth. In that respect, Germany goes...
It's because of Facebook. Says Ton van de Langkruis, artistic director of writers' festival Writers Unlimited: "You can no longer be that anonymous figure bombarding the world with hermetic texts from a locked attic room. The market is no longer for it. Your main means of communication is facebook. There you have to be open to questions, you communicate with your readers. We are back in the village square where the first stories were once told."
The latenight closures of Winternachten at Writers Unlimited are always upbeat. That's because the poets have already loosened up and the audience has drunk a bit more. And this time it was also because of mega-audience favourite (on other occasions) Arie Boomsma. Out of wantonness, the cheerful ratings canon smashed poetry books of his programme's guests.
Writers Unlimited is the most fun literary festival in the world. We can know, because we have been there twice now. Whether the comparison with all those 20 million other literature festivals in the world is entirely pure, we don't know. We do know that a lot of the writers who attend Writers Unlimited agree with us. At least during those few days and especially nights in January.
A few reasons.
We spoke briefly at Writers Unlimited 2013 with the woman who has been giving workshops in poetry to schoolchildren for a few years now. And we wondered again if rap wasn't enough for them, those kids. No. So it turns out. And she explains it clearly.
With a jam-packed programme like Writers Unlimited 2013, it sometimes happens that, even as a professional journalist, despite everything, you end up dropping in somewhere too late, and then just catching a glimpse of something really great. In this case, after the tour de force of Amos Oz and Adriaan van Dis, was that Kenyan Ngwatilo Mawiyoo's spoken word performance. Mea culpa for that.
And then, just like that, you can miss the highlight of the first Winternacht because you don't pull it together with a presenter. Flemish author Bart van Loo, according to many a twitterer, seems to have uttered beautiful sentences in the programme 'Daar geef ik mijn leven voor', but that was well after midnight and I was already
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