The Hague - Fragments of a Hidden City

Especially for Winternachten festival, three Hague writers take you to unknown parts of their city in a new poem or story.

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Information

Date and time Saturday 20 January 2018 22:00 tot 22:01 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 2

Three Hague authors - Max Lerou, Mira Feticu and Hizir Cengiz - have written a new story or poem especially for Writers Unlimited, inspired by what remains hidden in their city. This evening they came to read their new works. What a party!

But what is actually hidden? "The Hague is a segregated city," says Festival curator Shervin Nekuee. He's been living in the Netherlands for thirty years, including the last ten in The Hague. "Poor and rich, young and old, native-born and foreign-born live alongside one another. That's why it's high time to show the city to one another with new stories."

Lerou is a wonderful performer of his own work: as a full-blooded  performance poet, he enjoys getting inspired by music and his city. In 2017 he hit the stage during the opening of Parkpop and at the Embassy Festival on the Lange Voorhout.

Feticu writes poetry and prose. Her work has been published in Tirade and De Groene Amsterdammer; she writes a weekly column in Den Haag Centraal newspaper and is a programmer of B-Unlimited.

At age 18, Cengiz won the first Jan Paul Bresser Prize (2017) for his essay "The World Is a Bucket of Mud", published in De Groene Amsterdammer. In it, he describes how he moved to the Netherlands and ended up in the Schilderswijk. In the meantime he has been writing regular columns for De Groene Amsterdammer and working on a novel.

Line-up

Max Lerou

Poet and performer Max Lerou (The Hague, 1953) started out as a society hair stylist, journalist and manager of national Dutch broadcaster VPRO, among other jobs. As a young man he travelled across Europe with a circus. At later age he was based in Asia ,where he wrote English-language poetry and fiction. After returning to the Netherlands he quickly made himself a name as performance poet. Lerou was a Dutch Championship Poetry Slam finalist and was awarded, among others, the ABN AMRO Almere Poetry Prize. His performance during the official opening of Parkpop 2017 was a first in the history of this large open-air music festival in The Hague.
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Mira Feticu

(Romania, 1973) is a writer, poet and columnist. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1993, after which she devoted herself to prose. In 2005, she moved to The Hague with her Dutch husband André. There she decided to write in Dutch rather than Romanian. In her novels, she has successfully developed a personal and candid writing style. Her publications include Lief kind van mij (My Dear Child, 2012), De ziekte van Kortjakje (Kortjakje's Illness, 2013), Tascha. De roof uit de Kunsthal (Tascha: The Robbery at the Kunsthal, 2015), Al mijn vaders en Picasso's keerzijde (All My Fathers and Picasso's Other Side, 2019), and Liefdesverklaring aan de Nederlandse taal (Declaration of Love to the Dutch Language, 2021). After the loss of André, she wrote her latest novel Gewone Hollandse jongens (Ordinary Dutch Boys, 2025) about grief, physical desire and the search for stability in the company of others. Her articles and columns appear in Tirade, De Groene Amsterdammer and Den Haag Centraal, among others.

Go to the website of Mira Feticu
Instagram: @mirafeticu
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Hizir Cengiz

(1998) won, at age 18, the first Jan Paul Bresser Prize for his essay "The World is a Bucket of Mud", published in De Groene Amsterdammer. From the perspective of student, he describes coming to the Netherlands from Turkey as a small boy and ending up in the Hague's Schilderswijk neighbourhood. There, he sees boys choosing the wrong path, and the hate towards Muslims and the mudslinging increasing. "How is it possible, then, to build something for yourself?" he wonders, finishing with the words: "We have to wait for the mud to dry, to be hard enough to build fortresses." Cengiz has written for Scholieren.com and Mindshakes people profiles for the Hague and Rotterdam Straatniews newspapers. Since winning the prize, he regularly writes columns for De Groene Amsterdammer and is working on a novel.
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