Rešoketšwe Manenzhe
(South Africa) is a poet, short story writer and novelist. Her short stories and poems have appeared in the Kalahari Review, Fireside Fiction, Praxis Magazine, Lolwe, FIYAH, and the 2017 Sol Plaatjie European Union Anthology, among others. She holds a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Cape Town (UCT). Her debut. the historical novel Scatterlings (2020) is set in 1927, when South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between "Europeans" (white people) and "natives" (Black people). Those who break the draconian new law face imprisonment. Abram and his wife Alisa have their share of marital problems, but they also have a comfortable life in South Africa with their two young girls. But then the Act is passed. Alisa is black, and their two children are now evidence of their involvement in a union that has been criminalized by the state.
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The Flame of Freedom - Opening Writers Unlimited Festival 2025
With: Andrej Koerkov, Andrew Makkinga, Jan van Zanen, Judith Uyterlinde, Mamar, Nelleke Noordervliet, Onjuli Datta, Rešoketšwe Manenzhe, Viv Groskop
The 30th edition of the Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival The Hague has the theme On Fire. Fire symbolises destructive forces such as war and global warming on the one hand, but also love and freedom on the other. Jan van Zanen, mayor of The Hague, will officially open the festival.
The opening night is dedicated to free speech, with a keynote speech by Ukraine's most important writer Andrei Kurkov, whose two new books have just been published in Dutch translation: the gripping war diary Our Daily War and the Kyiv-based historical thriller The Silver Bone.
Other speakers are author Nelleke Noordervliet, who will read a column and British author and stand-up comedian Viv Groskop who will represent PEN International, the writers' organisation dedicated to freedom of expression.
This programme is also a preview and kick-off of the 30th edition of the festival, with readings, music and talks. Dutch national broadcaster NPO Radio 1-programme Kunststof presenter Andrew Makkinga will interview writers who will also perform elsewhere in the festival:
South African author Rešoketšwe Manenzhe wrote Scatterlings, her first novel about a young family broken up by the law that criminalised interracial relationships. The New York Times wrote: "a novel that is at once exquisitely intimate and globally ambitious." Rešoketšwe will also perform at both grand festival evening programmes Friday and Saturday Night Unlimited.
Famous British author, stand-up comedian, podcast creator, TV and radio presenter Viv Groskop has written seven books and creates the podcast How to Own the Room, listened to millions of times, on topics including self-confidence, public speaking and dealing with stressful situations.
Onjuli Datta and her wife Mikaella Clements, who work and live in Berlin, co-authored the novels The View was Exhausting and Feast While You Can. They will read a fragment of their own work in the form of a dialogue.
Mamar, a formation of young musicians from Syria, Turkey, the US, Italy and the Netherlands provides musical contributions. The band members are Barış Ofluoğlu (double bass), Sebastiaan West (piano), Rita Brancato (drums), Talaf Fayad (ud) and Leah Uijterlinde (clarinet, vocals).
The programme includes the screening of the short film Monument for murdered writers and journalists 2024, a project by Theatre of Wrong Decisions, Committee To Protect Journalists (CPJ) and PEN International.
The Flame of Freedom - Opening Writers Unlimited Festival 2025 is curated by Ilonka Reintjens.
Festival tip 1: after the opening night programme, join us for the spoken word event Mensen Zeggen Dingen x Writers Unlimited Festival, at Paard (starts 21:30 hours): the literary afterparty with poetry, poetry slam, prose and punchlines by Palestinian-American poet George Abraham, Aruban spoken word artist and poet Rosabelle Illes and, from The Netherlands, Sabina Lukovic, Duimalot and Damaris. Host will be Dean Bowen.
Get a discount here by buying a reduced price ticket for Mensen Zeggen Dingen x Writers Unlimited Festival at the online Paard box office for only 5,- (regular price 10,-).Festival tip 2: Rešoketšwe Manenzhe, Viv Groskop, Onjuli Datta and Andrei Kurkov will also perform during the grand festival nights Friday and Saturday Night Unlimited: experience the full festival experience here and choose your own route along performances, readings, talks, music and films with many authors and artists from home and abroad on five stages of Theater aan het Spui and the adjacent Filmhuis Den Haag.
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Storytelling Afternoon
With: Beatrice Hati Gitundu, Kees Biekart, Klaas van Dijk, Rešoketšwe Manenzhe, Rosabelle Illes
Storytelling in ISS is back as a part of the Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival The Hague! Visitors, authors participating in the festival, ISS students and teachers tell each other stories on a wintery afternoon in ISS's wonderful Atrium of the International Institute of Social Studies (part of the Erasmus University Rotterdam) on the Kortenaerkade in The Hague's city centre.
This time, authors Rešoketšwe Manenzhe (South Africa) and Rosabelle Illes (Aruba) are also storytellers, and pianist Klaas van Dijk will provide musical interludes. The stories revolve around the question 'What Inspires You? (Even though the World is On Fire..)'
The Storytelling Afternoon is a highly regarded festival classic. Due to the COVID pandemic, among other reasons, the programme could not take place for several editions. But on Thursday afternoon, 23 January 2025, everyone is welcome again to listen and/or tell a story. Each story will last no more than five minutes. The programme is in English and will be facilitated by Kees Biekart and Beatrice Hati Gitundu, both from the ISS.
Rešoketšwe Manenzhe is a poet, short story writer and novelist from South Africa. Her short stories and poems have appeared in the Kalahari Review, Fireside Fiction, Praxis Magazine, Lolwe, FIYAH, and the 2017 Sol Plaatjie European Union Anthology, among others. She holds a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Cape Town (UCT). Her debut. the historical novel Scatterlings (2020) is set in 1927, when South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between "Europeans" (white people) and "natives" (Black people). Those who break the draconian new law face imprisonment.
Rosabelle Illes is an artist, writer, and performer from Aruba. She has authored three collections of poetry and short stories and co-authored the multilingual children's book Hearty. Her work has been published in international journals, and she has performed at literary festivals worldwide, including Colombia, Taiwan, The Netherlands, and New York City. She holds a PhD in Psychology from Leiden University and is an assistant professor at the University of Aruba. Her upcoming book, Penmanship (2025), blends her passions for psychology and poetry, celebrating the written word in its purest form.
Klaas van Dijk is a pianist and dentist from The Netherlands. During his student days, he was active as a pop and jazz pianist. When he became a father, he started working as a dentist, but he continued to play music for theatre performances. From 1986, he accompanied famous Dutch cabaret artist Paul van Vliet on piano. Since 2016, he has been part of the team of the Dutch national TV programme Met het mes op tafel (a combination of poker and knowledge quiz) as a pianist together with host Sjoerd van Ramshorst and cabaret artist Mylou Frencken.
Kees Biekart is a political scientist at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and interested in transformative change and social movements, Together with his international students, he looks for alternative ways to support political democracy at a grassroots level. He constantly seeks out new forms of research, including "storytelling", which has become an increasingly important research method.
Beatrice Hati Gitundu is an Urban Development Specialist from Kenya. She works on the research programme Multilevel Disaster Governance: Disasters-People-Policy-Politics of the International Centre for Frugal Innovation (ICFI, The Netherlands)/Nuvoni (Kenya). She is also a Doctoral Researcher at the ISS.
30th Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival The Hague (23-25 January 2025)
Over a hundred authors, poets, spoken word artists and musicians will perform in the 30th Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival The Hague. From 23 to 26 January 2025, festival events will take place throughout The Hague in theatres, libraries and schools. For festival information and tickets, see writersunlimited.nl.
The festival will focus on, partly English-language, live readings of poetry, stories and spoken word. Authors will also discuss current topics in response to recent books. The festival opens 23 January dedicated to freedom of expression. It also includes two varied festival evenings in Theater aan het Spui and Filmhuis Den Haag, the presentation of the Hague Literature Prizes and free events in local libraries and cultural anchors. On Sunday afternoon, 26 January, the festival closes with the festive musical-literary show Playing with Fire in Amare.Festival motto: On Fire
The 30th festival edition's motto is On Fire. 'Fire represents love, desire and passion, but also burning issues such as war, migration and climate,' says Judith Uyterlinde, director of Writers Unlimited. 'Fire is the source of inspiration for talks and readings on issues including freedom of expression, war and remembrance, gender and eroticism, and a host of other issues that ignite writers, poets and audiences.' -
Speech, Silence
In Speech, Silence, six poets respond to the question: what is poetry's relation to silence? Their poetry readings will include new work, written especially for this purpose. You will see and hear Palestinian-American poet George Abraham, Danish writer and poet Asta Olivia Nordenhof, South African writer and poet Rešoketšwe Manenzhe and, from the Netherlands, poets Pelumi Adejumo, Yasmin Namavar and Maureen Ghazal.
This programme takes it's title from the poem Sprekers, zwijgers by the Dutch writer Lidy van Marissing, published in her latest collection De verwerping van het stilzitten (The rejection of inaction, 2024). Van Marissing's poem speaks of a "language half speaking, half silent, rocking back / and forth in between."
Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah commented on speaking and silence in a recent interview with The New Inquiry: "We need to learn how to listen in silence to the Palestinian in their silence. So far, when a Palestinian goes silent, it means they are dead or violable, digestible, liable for further erasure or dispossession. English has not begun imagining the Palestinian speaking, let alone understanding Palestinian silence."
Fady Joudah's words make us rethink poetry and silence. Poetry, and our discourse about poetry, always run the risk of degenerating into a domestication of silence, a way of making silence available and digestible to an audience, often in a language that is also used to commit the atrocities producing so many forms of silence.
The poets recite their new work written especially for Speech, Silence in their preferred language of writing. The poems will be simultaneously projected in Dutch and/or English.
Speech, Silence has been curated for Writers Unlimited Festival 2025 by Maarten van der Graaff.
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Scatterlings
What does it mean when you have to leave your country of origin to start a new life in another place? Writers Abdelkader Benali and Rešoketšwe Manenzhe tell stories about migration and displacement, based on their latest books. Çiler Ilhan moderates the conversation.
In her debut novel Scatterlings (recently published in the Netherlands as Zwervelingen), Manenzhe wrote about the disintegration and displacement of a biracial family as a result of the racist 1927 Ontuchtwet, which criminalised biracial relationships.
Stories of migration also take centre stage in De opdracht van de Moor (The Assignment of the Moor), Abdelkader Benali's new novel to be published in January 2025: stories of travellers, refugees and fortune-seekers that form the basis of an ambitious project: moving flood-threatened Venice to a safe desert in the Middle East.
Rešoketšwe Manenzhe is a poet, short story writer and novelist. Her short stories and poems have appeared in the Kalahari Review, Fireside Fiction, Praxis Magazine, Lolwe, FIYAH, and the 2017 Sol Plaatjie European Union Anthology, among others. She holds a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Cape Town (UCT). Her debut, the historical novel Scatterlings (2020) is set in 1927, when South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between white and black people. Those who break the draconian new law face imprisonment.
Abdelkader Benali is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright and curator. His 1996 debut, Bruiloft aan zee (Wedding By the Sea), was an immediate success. His second novel, De langverwachte (The Long-awaited) won him the prestigious 2003 Libris Literature Award. Benali's subjects vary, but sports and the migrant who never really feels at home are recurring themes. He has written novels about his great passion of running, about his travels, and about migrants' cultural identity. His new novel De opdracht van de Moor (The Moor's mission) is published in January 2025.
Çiler Ilhan writes novels, essays, reviews and translations for various newspapers and magazines. In 2006 she debuted with the short-story collection Ruya Tacirleri Odası (Chamber of Dream Merchants). Surgun (Exile, 2010) won the EU Literature Prize and was published in 24 countries. In 2021 she published Nişan Evi (Engagement), a novella about lives lost under the weight of power factors in eastern Turkey.
Scatterlings is curated for Writers Unlimited Festival 2025 by Ilonka Reintjens.
