Olga Grjasnowa
(Baku, 1984) emigrated at age 12 from Azerbaijan to Germany with her Jewish family. She studied in Göttingen and Leipzig and was a 2014 writer-in-residence in Amsterdam. Her first, partly autobiographical novel, 2012's Een Rus is iemand die van berken houdt (A Russian is Someone who Loves Birches) is primarily about migration, according to critics, while Grjasnowa herself also wanted to bring exclusion and racism to light. In the novel, an Azerbaijani flees to Germany because of the war. After the death of her boyfriend she goes to Israel, but doesn't fully feel at home anywhere. The writer experiences this herself: even though she has a German passport, she must always account for where she comes from. Her second novel, 2014's De juridische schimmigheden van een huwelijk (The Legal Shadiness of Marriage) is about an explosive love triangle between a dancer and her husband and another woman.
Past events
Through the Noordeinde: De Filosoof
Wineshop De Filosoof at Papestraat 5 in The Hague is the place where wine, philosophy and poetry embrace.
My Secret City
The festival asked seven authors to write about their own "secret" cities. Not the city that they see when they walk out the door but the city that they occasionally and unexpectedly come across. They read in their own language, with English and Dutch translations projected simultaneously.
In the Mirror of Refugees
The image that refugees have of Europe does not match the reality they experience upon arrival. Europe is a fiction.
