At the Spotlight Festival, on Saturday afternoon September 7 2024, from 14:00 to 14:30 at Amare in The Hague (free admission), Zaïre Krieger (spoken word) and XILLAN (music) will perform a sneak peek of the 30th Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival The Hague (January 23-26, 2025)! Francis Broekhuijsen will talk about the festival and introduce both artists, who will return in January for performances during the literature festival.

On Friday, September 6, and Saturday, September 7, in honor of the Spotlight Festival, you can purchase tickets for 15 euros each for the major Writers Unlimited Festival evenings Friday and Saturday Night Unlimited. Note that from 8 September, these tickets cost 25 Euro!

Zaïre Krieger (1995) is a poet, spoken word artist, activist, journalist and translator. In 2019, she received a SPOKEN Award as ‘one of the most inspiring Dutch word artists of the moment’. Krieger's work expresses a call for justice and love. In 2020, she co-organised a Black Lives Matter protest in Rotterdam.

Her performances are layered, rhythmic and sincere. She translated the poem The Hill We Climb recited by Amanda Gorman during Joe Biden's inauguration into Dutch. The bilingual edition was released in 2022. In 2023, also bilingual English and Dutch, Gorman's collection Call Us What We Carry was published in Krieger and Tirsa With's translation.

In 2024, Krieger's bilingual poetry collection Chameleon will be published, about creating your own place to feel at home, allowing yourself to be multidimensional, about the opposition between activism and aesthetics, queerness and religion, loving and hating, about being Black in a white world.

XILLAN (1993) grew up with his twin brother Jeangu in Suriname. He moved to the Netherlands in his early twenties to study at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and developed into a successful singer-songwriter of personal, alternative R&B. At the Writers Unlimited Festival in January 2025, XILLAN will be featured as a musician and writer.

In early 2025, his first novel Mensen als zonnen en mensen als manen (People as Suns and People as Moons) will be published. The novel is part of a project that also includes a theater performance and a music album. The project is about growing up as a Black queer boy in Suriname and how notions of masculinity influence an individual’s life. It is a remarkable literary coming-of-age debut from an important new voice. Very few books have appeared in Surinamese-Dutch literature that openly testify to queerness.

Francis Broekhuijsen is a presenter, program maker, actor, and voice-over artist specializing in music, literature, art, and culture. He also narrates audiobooks. On the national radio station Sublime, he presented, among others, the daily morning show Sublime Sunrise, the Instagram poetry program Sublime Smooth, and the most relaxed evening show in the Netherlands, The Sublime Experience. Francis is associated with Writers Unlimited as an editor, program maker, and presenter of the festival.