Overview festival authors from abroad 2025
Which authors from abroad are performing in the Writers Unlimited Festival The Hague 2025? Here is the overview with reading tips. Discover your new favourite books, book your tickets and join us!
Every year, the Writers Unlimited Festival introduces you to a number of authors from abroad. Sometimes they are world-famous writers, sometimes they are debut talents. The festival is happy to introduce them all to you. You will see and hear them perform with readings from their existing work or with newly written stories or poems commissioned by the festival. In conversations, they share their thoughts on topical affairs or on their own favourite books.
During Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival The Hague 2025, the following authors from abroad will perform:
Elif Shafak (France) is an award-winning Turkish-British bestselling author and important critical voice in world literature, with a vast body of novels, essays and nonfiction. In her books, she denounces religious fanaticism and xenophobia. She has a special interest in feminism, Sufism, Ottoman culture and the city of Istanbul. Well known titles include The Bastard of Istanbul (2006), The Forty Rules of Love (2011), The House of the Four Winds (2013) and The Three Daughters of Eva (2017). In 2024 she published her novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, set on the shores of the Tigris and the Thames.
Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian writer world famous for the mix of harsh realism and absurdist humour in his novels and non fiction books. He is a respected commentator on the situation in his country. Dairy of an Invasion (2022) and Our daily war (2024) are collections of Kurkov's writings and broadcasts. In 2024, he published The Silver Bone, the first part of The Kyiv Mysteries, his series of crime novels in historical settings.
Timothy Snyder (USA) is a internationally leading historian specialising in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Holocaust. The professor of History at Yale University has published influential studies such as Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Tony Judt, 2012); Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) and the highly topical On Freedom (2024).
Viv Groskop (UK) is an award-winning writer, comedian, broadcaster and performance coach. She is the author of the best-selling How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking (2018). Her podcast How to Own the Room is the biggest public speaking podcast in the world and features interviews with Hillary Clinton, Margaret Atwood, Professor Mary Beard and Julie Andrews. She appears regularly on BBC TV and radio and for six years she did a run of sold-out one-woman comedy shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. As a columnist she writes regularly for the Guardian and the Financial Times.
Asta Olivia Nordenhof (Denmark) is an award-winning poet and author. In 2020 she published Money to Burn, which was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature. Revolving around the Scandinavian Star disaster in 1990 and tracing how capitalism infects ordinary lives, Money to Burn and The Devil Book caused an international literary sensation and are the first two instalments in a planned septology.
Alvina Chamberland (USA) is a Swedish-American author of predominantly literary autofiction novels, residing between Athens and Berlin. Through poetic prose, sharp social commentary and self-deprecating gallows humor her novel and English language debut Love the World or Get Killed Trying (2024) dives into the mind of Alvina, a trans woman on the eve of turning 30. The reader follows her journey through the wilderness of Iceland and city boulevards of Berlin and Paris as she probes questions of eternity, sexuality, longing, death and love.
Mikaella Clements (Australia) and Onjuli Datta (UK) are co-authors of Feast While You Can, a queer horror-romance which the New York Times described as 'adventurous, exciting, fantastical and erotic.' There also co-wrote The View Was Exhausting, a Goop and Good Housekeeping book club pick named 'a perfect summer read' by Vogue. They live together as wives in Berlin.
Rešoketšwe Manenzhe (South Africa) is a poet, short story writer and novelist. Her debut historical novel Scatterlings (2020) is set in 1927, when South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between "Europeans" and "natives". Those who break the draconian new law face imprisonment. Abram and his wife Alisa have a comfortable life in South Africa with their two young girls. Alisa is black, and their two children are now evidence of their involvement in a union that has been criminalized by the state.
Rosabelle Illes (Aruba) is an artist, writer, and performer. 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. Her upcoming book, Penmanship (2025), blends her passions for psychology and poetry, celebrating the written word in its purest form.
Stefanie Parisius-Sewotaroeno is a Surinamese author of Javanese descent who mainly writes poetry. She grew up in De Hulp, Commewijne and draws inspiration from culture, nature and social issues. Stefanie is currently working on her debut. She is one of 18 writing talents inspired by works from the Mauritshuis collection in The Hague for the deBuren series Oude werken, jonge schrijvers (Old Works, Young Writers).
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