The 15th edition of Winternachten is about rules. See and hear the writer as rule-breaker, taboo revolutionary, intractable thinker and inventor of new rules. Enjoy a long weekend of Winternachten in The Hague, and choose from more than forty programmes on fives stages in Theater aan het Spui and Filmhuis Den Haag.

You'd think that not a single rule is wasted on writers. But is that really so? More than eighty writers, musicians and visual artists from fifteen countries explore existing and newly to be formulated rules. They read from their own and from other writers' work, play the main part in conversations and public discussions and sparkle in films and documentaries.

The four-day festival opens with the Winternachten Lecture by Antjie Krog on Thursday evening. On Saturday afternoon 16 January you can choose from two programmes. Do you opt for for How to Bluff your Way into Saba, Statia and Bonaire? Or would you rather join the Leescub Live (Readers' Club live) to discuss the new Dutch translation of the work of Franz Kafka? Winternachten 1, a programme on five stages on Friday evening 15 January, opens with a speech by lawyer Gerard Spong. MC Raoul Heertje will guide us in a search for the Golden Rule, with among others Tarun Tejpal, Tommy Wieringa and Junot Diaz. Furthermore this evening trombonist Wolter Wierbos, poems by secondary school pupils from The Hague, a manual for making harmful literature in Rules for Radicals and the movie The Yes Men Fix the World. During Winternachten 2 on Saturday evening 16 January, you choose from more than fifteen programmes with very diverse guests and subsjects. With the American bestseller author Jonathan Safran Foer, the Dutch poet laureate Ramsey Nasr, a course in new etiquette and a tribute to Michaël Zeeman, the writer, journalist and host at Winternachten, who died last year.
The festival closes on Sunday morning with a live radio broadcast of VPRO's OVT in café brasserie Dudok.

Read all about the programmes on this site. You can order tickets online or at the box office of Theater aan het Spui. Tickets for Winternachten 1 and 2 give you access to all five venues in the theatre.

Enjoy Winternachten!

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