New Talent in the House!

Five powerful new female stars in the literary firmament talk about their ultimate sense of being at home in specially written commentaries.

Information

Date and time Saturday 17 January 2015 22:30 tot 23:20 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 2

Five powerful new female stars in the literary firmament talk about their ultimate sense of being at home in specially written commentaries. Much-discussed debutante Nina Polak and her up-and-coming colleagues Bregje Hofstede, Mira Feticu, Roos van Rijswijk, and Shantie Singh appear in a varied program. Presented by Simone van Saarloos. In Dutch.

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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Bregje Hofstede

(Ede, NL, 1988) make her debut in 2014 with De Hemel boven Parijs (The Sky Over Paris). In this novel, an elderly professor of art history at the Sorbonne falls under the spell of a Dutch exchange student, who is the spitting image of his first love. Her presence points out the lies in his life. The central question is how to live with the ever-present possibility of failure, such as in love. Never start so as never to fail, or aim for the top at the risk of being destroyed? The translation rights for the novel have already been sold in Germany and Denmark. Hofstede lives in Brussels and studied art history and French in Utrecht, Paris, and Berlin. She received the 2012/2013 Hollands Maandblad magazine's "encouragement" scholarship for her short stories and essays. Hofstede works at a European heritage organization and is an editor at a speech and text agency. She is co-author of De Verbeelders (The Illustrators), a book about more than 100 years of book illustration in the Netherlands.
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Shantie Singh

(The Netherlands, 1982) is an author, program maker, and moderator. Themes such as identity, diversity, women's rights, and emancipation are often central to her work. Her background is layered and connected to three continents in the countries of India, Suriname, and The Netherlands. She wrote about this in her debut novel Vervoering. This was followed by the novel De kier. In 2024, her non-fiction book Na de komma – Hindostanen en de erfenis van het kolonialisme (After the Comma – Hindustani People and the Legacy of Colonialism) was published, her plea for greater recognition and visibility of the Hindustani story in the Netherlands. This book inspired her theatre production Her (s)tories (2024-2025), an ode to the women from Hindustani migration history. In her De Dolle Kavita Talkshow, Shantie welcomes trailblazers (women, men, or anything in between) with a story that needs to be heard. She is also a member of the feministic writers collective Fixdit.

Go to the website of Shantie Singh
Instagram: @shantie.singh1
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Nina Polak

(1986) made a big impression in 2014 with her first novel We zullen niet te pletter slaan (We Won't Be Smashed to Pieces), a stormy family tale about Anna and Schard, the children of two lesbian mothers. Polak wrote the novel to explore what happens to a boy growing up among women, and to examine the role of non-biological parents. Schard reconnects with Anna after a trip to India; at that point, both are looking for the meaning of art, love, and life. They know what they want: to be a father, a wife, a hero, a lover—but can't find their way. We Zullen Niet... was nominated for the AKO Literature Prize. Reviewers praised Polak for her flowery style and daring metaphors that manage not to be overdone. Polak studied in Amsterdam and New York. She writes for De Groene Amsterdammer and Correspondent magazines about subjects like television, games, films, and literature.
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Roos van Rijswijk

(The Netherlands, 1985) is a presenter, interviewer and writer of prose, essays, interviews, columns, theatre pieces and reviews for a variety of Dutch publications. In 2016 she debuted with the novel Onheilig (Unholy), which won the Anton Wachter Prize. In 2017 her prose poem Calligram was published, upon which the daily newspaper De Volkskrant named her literary talent of the year. She wrote the collections Wat ben ik meer dan stilte – verhalen van geesten (What Am I But Silence - Stories of Ghosts, 2018), De olifant van de bovenbuurman (The Elephant of the Upstairs Neighbor, 2018, a picture book for adults with drawings by Sylvia Weve), and De Dwaler (The Wanderer, 2021). Van Rijswijk reviews translated fiction for Dutch national daily newspaper NRC and teaches at the Schrijversvakschool in Amsterdam.
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Simon(e) van Saarloos

is a writer, artistic collaborator and curator. They are the author of Against Ageism. A Queer Manifesto (2023); Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (2021) and Playing Monogamy (2019) as well as several books in Dutch: Herdenken herdacht (2019); Enz. Het Wildersproces (2018); the novel De vrouw die (2016); the collection of columns Ik deug / deug niet ( 2015) and Het monogame drama (2015). . Van Saarloos works as an independent curator of public programming and artistic collaborations. A current PhD candidate in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, they are interested in Black feminist engagements with quantum physics and focused on the rhetorical (im)possibility of existence without defense. Van Saarloos is currently writing a new book for AK Press, titled Trans Despair: Staying Unrelated and Insecure.

Go the website of Simon(e) van Saarloos
Instagram: @svansaarloos
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