European Literature Night 2020

The European Literature Night, a EUNIC Netherlands project, brings together both celebrated authors and promising literary talents from all over Europe. It is a space for exploration, for understanding differences and recognizing similarities, reimagining ‘Europeanness’ for both authors and audiences. This year’s theme is ‘Literature, the Antidote’.

Never before have we been so connected and so isolated at the same time. What will our world look like after the pandemic? According to Arundhati Roy Covid-19 ‘is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next’, which ‘forces humans to break with the past and to imagine their world anew.’ How can we imagine this world? What can literature predict on the basis of the experience of the past months in Europe? Let’s listen to the European writers of today, the antennae of our societies. Can literature be an antidote?

The European Literature Night is this year part of the Forum on European Culture, and paired with the State of European Literature, a key note co-organized by UvA (Faculty of Humanities, ACES, supported by OSL). This annual lecture, this year inaugurated by Philipp Blom, will address the state of literature in Europe and the state of Europe through the perspective of literature.

The Literature night will take place at De Brakke Grond, on Friday the 18th of September from 9.00 pm – 11.00 pm. To attend the Literature Night physically, you can buy tickets on the website of the Forum on European Culture, where you can also find biographies of the authors.

You can also watch the event through livestream for free. The livestream can be found at the bottom of this page, on the YouTube channel of the Forum on European Culture or on our own Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/EUNICNL.

The European Literature Night was organized with the help of

British Council Netherlands, Litouws Cultureel Centrum, De Brakke Grond, Instituto Cervantes, Goethe Institut Niederlande, the Embassy of Slovenia, the Embassy of Switzerland, Institut Français des Pays-Bas, DutchCulture, the Embassy of Austria, and Tsjechisch Centrum Rotterdam.

supported by

And in collaboration with