VPRO OVT Live

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One of the best listened to programmes of Radio I is VPRO's O.V.T, present perfect tense, or open past. Every Sunday morning the topicality of history occupies centre stage. It's a tradition now that the programme makers move to the heart of The Hague during the festival to broadcast live from Café Brasserie Dudok. This time the focus is on Lucas Hüsgen (writer of Nazi te Venlo), on the Dutch author Gerrit Komrij, who died last year,  and on the work of Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. There is live music by jazz singer Denise Jannah, accompanied by guitarist Robby Alberga. Paul van der Gaag and Mathijs Deen are the familiar hosts. Open to the public, admission free, including coffee and cake. In Dutch.

Information

Date and time Sunday 20 January 2013 from 10:00 to 11:30 hrs
Location Dudok

Mathijs Deen

(Hengelo, NL 1962) is a radio journalist and a writer. His most recently published book is De Wadden (The Frisian islands; 2013), a poetic history of the Frisian islands. His book of short stories Brutus heeft honger (Brutus is hungry, 2011) was nominated for the AKO Literature Prize. Eating being the leitmotiv, Deen jumps through world history. The forty-four historical stories are fine miniatures of scarcely one and a half page long. After having studied Dutch in Groningen Deen worked for Radio Noord for some years. His radio columns from those days were collected in two publications. Since 2001 Deen has been programme maker with VPRO radio, hosting the historical radio programme OVT. A number of historical documentaries which he made for VPRO radio has been published as an audiobook. The radio series De lange weg naar Darwin (Long road to Darwin) appeared on cd and as a podcast. Deen was programme coordinator of the Winternachten Festival between 2009 and 2011.
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Paul van der Gaag

(Netherlands, 1958) has produced and presented the VPRO radio programme OVT since 2002, a two-hour show about the historical roots of current events as well as newly released historical books, films, commemorations, and anything else related to history. The show features live interviews, reportage, columns and a weekly documentary during the last half hour. He was already linked to OVT since 1992 as a programmer and previously freelanced for other national Dutch broadcasters such as VARA and IKON.
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Denise Jannah

(Suriname, 1956), a Dutch jazz singer and voice teacher of Surinemese origin, has performed around the world for Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, among others. From 2013 to 2016 she toured the Netherlands with Ella!, a production that will be staged again in 2017, the centenary of Ella Fitzgerald's birth. Jannah won two Edisons and appeared seven times at the North Sea Jazz Festival. She was the first Dutch performer to land a record contract with the prestigious jazz label Blue Note. Jannah has performed with musicians such as Chick Corea, Frank Boeijen, the Rosenberg Trio and Willem Breuker. For this festival in 2002, she set poems to music from the Netherlands, Suriname, the Antilles, South Africa and Indonesia. She took the same program to literary festivals in Utrecht, Suriname, the Antilles, South Africa and Indonesia. In 2015 she toured Russia and appeared in Dutch theatres in a musical production about the battle for emancipation of two women in Suriname.



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Lucas Hüsgen

(Weert, NL 1960), penname of Lucas de Jong, made his debut in 1992 with Zeehond in wormgat (Seal in Worm Hole). Followed a year later by the collections of poetry Nevels orgel (Nebula's Organ; nomination C. Buddingh' Prize). The anthology Deze rouwmoedige schoonheid (This Mourncourageous Beauty, 2005) was nominated for the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Award.

 According to the jury the laboured language demands a lot from the reader, but his poems are 'so seductive and witty that we become detached from every callibrated mode of reasoning or poetic tradition.' His novel Plooierijen van geschik (2007) made it to the 2008 longlist of the Libris Literature Prize and the Gouden Uil. Hüsgen translates Korean poetry and his recent novel De Windbel (The Wind Bell) reads like a road movie through Korea and the virtual world. He also works for the literary magazines Yang and Parmentier and regularly writes for musical projects. For Nazi te Venlo (Nazi In Venlo, 2011), a quest for the alleged Nazi past of his great-grandfather, he was recipient of the J. Greshoff Prize.
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Nelleke Noordervliet

(Netherlands, 1945) writes novels, stories, essays, lectures and columns with a strong historical bent. She debuted with 1987's Tine of de dalen waar het leven woont (Tine, or the Valleys Where Life Lives), a fictitious biography of 19th-century Dutch writer Multatuli's first wife. Her book De naam van de vader (The Name of the Father) won the 1994 Multatuli Prize. In 2002 she wrote Pelican Bay, about slavery in the Caribbean and the Netherlands. Her essay collection Schatplicht (Tribute) appeared in 2013, and her 2016 novel Aan het eind van de dag (At the End of the Day) is simultaneously a portrait of a career woman and a snapshot of the second half of the 20th century. De val van Thomas G. (The fall of Thomas G.) tells about the publisher of a controversial book. Noordervliet's body of work was awarded the 2018 Constantijn Huygens Prize.
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Frank Westerman

(Emmen, NL, 1964) studied tropical agricultural engineering and was a correspondent for the Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad newspapers in Belgrade and Moskow. He wrote about his time there in 1994's De Brug over de Tara (The Bridge over the River Tara). Together with journalist Bart Rijs he wrote 1997's  Srebrenica, Het zwartste scenario (Srebrenica, the Blackest Scenario). Ingenieurs van de ziel (Engineers of the Soul) was published in 2002, an inquiry into the foundations of the Soviet system and the role of writers. De Graanrepubliek (The Grain Republic), about the struggle between rich gentlemen farmers and communist workers in Groningen, was published earlier. Westerman's novel El Negro en ik (El Negro and Me), inspired by a preserved South African in a Spanish museum, was published in 2004 and won the Gouden Uil prize. His revised and augmented 2015 edition of De Slag om Srebrenica (The Battle for Srebrenica) won the Prinsjes Book Prize for best political book. Een woord een woord (One Word One Word) appeared in 2016, in which he tests the strength of free speech under the pressure of terrorist threats. As a child, he experienced the Molukkan train hijacking at close quarters; as a correspondent, he witnessed Chechen terror in Russia. Drawing on these gripping experiences, he describes a series of hostage dramas. In Zeven dieren bijten terug (Seven Animals Bite Back), Frank Westerman encounters seven magnificent creatures in the wake of Willem Barentsz. Along the way, the reader becomes captivated by the wondrous tale of seven polar animals and what they have to tell us at our latitude.
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Onno Blom

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