Thomas von der Dunk: The text of my life

The cultural philosopher cannot choose yet. We'll wait and hear. In Dutch.

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Information

Date and time Saturday 19 January 2013 21:00 tot 21:20 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - De Kas

The greenhouse just outside the theatre is the place to hang out with smokers. What you can't do inside, you can do outside. And there they are, listening via loudspeakers to what's happening in the Greenhouse Effect. Peering through the glass they see Manon Uphoff and Aleid Truijens receiving writers. Someone else every twenty minutes. Now it's Thomas von der Dunk's turn, the cultural philosopher. The festival asked him the question: what text changed his life. Which poem or which fragment from a novel. He doens't know. There is so much... Maybe he'll find out tonight. You ask him! Programme in Dutch.

Thomas von der Dunk

(Soest, NL 1961) is a cultural historian and writer. For a number of years he worked as a researcher at various universities. Since 2002 he has been a freelance writer and political commentator. His often merciless columns, in which he frequently goes for the player, not seldom lead to controversy. In 2011 he was commissioned to do the Dutch Willem Arondéus lecture. When it appeared that he mercilessly attacked Dutch politician Geert Wilders' populist party, he was asked to leave out several passages. Von der Dunk refused and hence the lecture was called off. Von der Dunk decided to read it out anyway, with a turnout of 1,200 listeners. In his lecture he argued that there is a new taboo on comparisons with WWII, while these can be instructive and relevant in our times. Von der Dunk has published some fifteen books on as many cultural and historical subjects, varying from a German political portrayal of life and customs of ten centuries to a history of the Moses and Aron Church in Amsterdam.
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Manon Uphoff

(The Netherlands, 1962) is a Dutch writer, screenwriter and visual artist. She made her debut in 1995 with the collection of short stories Begeerte (Desire), which was nominated for the AKO Literature Prize, the Anton Wachter Prize and the ECI Prize. The title story was awarded the Rabobank Spring Prize for Literature. Her first novel Gemis (1997) was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize. Her most recent book, Vallen is als vliegen (Falling is Like Flying, 2019), was shortlisted for both the 2019 Bookspot Literature Prize and the 2020 Libris Literature Prize. The novel was named the best Dutch-language novel of 2019 by NRC Handelsblad and Humo. Uphoff was editor of the literary magazine De Revisor and board member and president of PEN Netherlands. As a screenwriter, she wrote the feature film screenplay Een Groot Geweld (Topkapi Films).
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Aleid Truijens

(Amsterdam, NL 1955) writes for daily newspapers and mgazines, particularly about art, literature, upbringing and education. In 2012 she published a book about these topics. In it she sketches the dilemmas of modern parenthood. In her weekly column for Volkskrant too Truijens writes a lot about upbringing and education. She made her debut in 2004 with Geen nacht zonder (Not a Night without), about a four-year old girl suffering from leukemia and the impact it has of the family. This novel was translated in German. Her second novel Vriendendienst (Friendly Turn; 2007) is about a bunch of schoolfriends taking stock together around their fiftieth birthday. They are all traumatised by the early suicide of one of their friends. In 2011 her biography about the writer F.B. Hotz appeared, about whom she had already published in the 1990s. In 1997 she published a biography of the renowned Dutch writer Hella Haasse.
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