Friday Night Wintercafé: Spot On Young Poets

Francis Broekhuijsen presents the students of The Hague Montessori Lyceum, and the Johan de Witt College who read their own poetry, the result of workshops given by members of The Hague Poetry Guild. Young poets Jeroen van Rooij and Runa Svetlikova perform alongside.

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Information

Date and time Friday 15 January 2016 20:10 tot 21:00 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - foyer

Francis Broekhuijsen presents the students of the Hague Montessori Lyceum, and the Johan de Witt College who read their own poetry, the result of workshops given by members of the Hague Poetry Guild. Young poets Jeroen van Rooij and Runa Svetlikova perform alongside.

Francis Broekhuijsen

(The Netherlands, 1970) is a presenter, producer, actor and voice-over artist specializing in music, literature, arts and culture. After graduating as actor from the Toneelschool Amsterdam he was a member, among others, of the ensemble of the Nationale Toneel. He was a presenter at Amsterdam-based broadcaster AT5 and a radio producer with the KRO on national network NPO Radio 1. He narrates audio books, and was shortlisted for the Storytel Award 2019 for Best Audio Book with his reading of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer's novel Grand Hotel Europa. Until last year, he presented on radio station Sublime the daily morning show Sublime Sunrise, the Instagram poetry programme Sublime Smooth and evening show The Sublime Experience. In 2025 he wrote and hosted the tv-series Kringlopen met Francis on regional Dutch broadcaster NH. Broekhuijsen works for Writers Unlimited as festival curator and presenter.

Go to the website of Francis Broekhuijsen
Instagram: @francisbroekhuijsen
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Runa Svetlikova

(Belgium, 1982) debuted in 2014 with her poetry collection Deze zachte witte kamer (This Soft White Room), which won the Herman De Coninck debut prize and was nominated for the C. Buddingh Prize. She does regular readings and organizes small poetry festivals. For her, poetry is "a means to exercise control over what is uncontrollable, with a pen for a weapon and my magnifying glass for a shield." She writes about everything: "what I read in magazines about psychology and science, or something I saw, a man in a suit and yellow sneakers... Yet mainly it's people who inspire me: weaknesses and neuroses, beauty in ugliness: the death of my father, and the fact that my daughter's fingernails have the same shape as his did." In her book and on her website, Svetlikova pays a lot of attention to design. Not surprisingly: besides language and literature, she also studied graphic design.
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Jeroen van Rooij

(Geldrop, NL, 1979) debuted in 2010 with De eerste hond in de ruimte (The First Dog in Space), tales of young people on all-night techno and drug binges that broaches themes of loneliness, addition and relationships. These collected stories had previously appeared in the Flemish literary magazine DW B. His second book Het licht (The Light, 2012), which made the Golden Book-Owl prize longlist, again focused on a group of friends who listen to music, experiment with drugs and sex, and endlessly keep up with social media until their lives are disrupted by a series of suicides. His 2014 poetry debut, Niemand had er enig idee van wat er aan de hand was (No One Had Any Idea What Was Going On), was nominated for the C. Buddingh Prize. Van Rooij's poems tend to conjure an uneasy, tense atmosphere via out-of-context quotes, showing a world that repeatedly defies our plans and expectations.
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