MENSEN ZEGGEN DINGEN x WRITERS UNLIMITED FESTIVAL

Benzokarim is a spoken-word artist and poet. As coach of Poetry Circle 070 and a programmer at Mensen Zeggen Dingen (People Say Things), he’s working hard on the path for a new generation of do-gooders. In 2020 he won third place at the Dutch Poetry Slam Championship. Karim moves you even before he has spoken. His presence speaks. His performances are musical, rhythmic, dynamic, and full of emotion as only he can express them. Mourning, uncertainty, and navigating through adult life are the common subjects in his work. At a time when distances have never been greater, Karim tries to offer intimacy with his words. In his first poetry collection El Ghorba (2022), he speaks with his father, mourns his mother, and tells about experiences familiar to anyone with an migration background.

Dean Bowen is a poet, performer and teacher. As evident in his multilingual poetry collection Bokman (2018), his work looks at the relationship of people’s identity to society. A strong performance won him the first Van Dale SPOKEN Award in the poetry category. In 2019 and 2020 he was poet laureate of Rotterdam. Ik vond geen spoken in Achtmaal (I Found No Ghosts in Achtmaal, 2020) describes, via diary entries, poems, confessions, and rituals, the search for what remains of a person long after they have died. He has published poems on the online platforms SampleKanon and Hard//Hoofd and in magazines such as nY and Kunsttijdschrift Vlaanderen. Together with musician-artist Willie Darktrousers and with poets Martin Rombouts and Maxime Garcia Diaz, he created the music and spoken-word performance Poetic Resistance: a poetic indictment of anger and resistance.

Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist whose work explores the possibilities of literature as an instrument for thinking about experiences often excluded from literature, particularly those related to gender, class, labour and illness. Written after her cancer diagnosis, The Undying (2019) is a meditation on cancer, care, and what it means to be ill inside of the “information’s dream” — our data-saturated era. A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018) is a collection of essays and fables about poetry, love, death, and other impossible questions. Boyer’s works of poetry include Garments Against Women (2015); My Common Heart (2011); and The Romance of Happy Workers (2008). Boyer is an Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Angelina Enny is a writer, actor and theatre director. Her debut collection of stories, Nocturnal Melancholia, about the beauty and esthetics of depression, was nominated for the Kusala Literature Award and has been reworked for the theatre. In 2019, Angelina collaborated with the Dutch writer and musician Robin Block on the poetry collection In Between, Di Antara. In it, they seek out their personal stories, (family) memories and dreams, as well as their shared (Indonesian) history. The project resulted in the performance A Passage, Sebuah Antara, a mix of poetry, songs, movement and images, which they performed in 2019 at the Literature and Ideas Festival (LIFEs) in Jakarta. In 2021, her script The Fifteenth Night about the 1998 Riots, was nominated for Jakarta Film Fund. Her new work, Finding Sita in the Indies, is a novelette about the ancestral identity in colonial era.

Sjaan Flikweert creates spoken-word, music, dance/performance art and film. Flikweert is an interdisciplinarian who creates emotional worlds in which the smallest details take on a leading role. Through personal stories, she allows contrasts to coexist effortlessly and palpably, confronting her audience with assumptions, judgments and expectations. She has been an active performing artist at home and abroad for over 12 years. Her work was featured in the Dutch-language spoken-word anthology Hard op (Aloud, 2019). She has published the audiovisual poetry collections ergens thuis en de ruimte ertussen (somewhere at home and the space in between) and De werkelijkheid heeft me niet nodig (Reality does not need me), which was selected for the 2021 Dutch Film Festival.

Ronelda S. Kamfer is one of today’s most important South African authors. She writes in Cape-Afrikaans, a spoken language containing English words and slang. Her work has been translated into Dutch, French, Greek, Italian and English. Her first poetry collection Noudat Slapende Honde (Now Then Sleeping Dogs, 2008) paints a sharp picture of poverty. Santekraam (2012) contains stories in verse about a fishing village that must make way for a military site. Mammie (2017) is a loving as well as raw ode to her mother. Chinatown (2021) is typically hard-hitting. Kamfer’s poems, as controlled as they are intimate and darkly humourous, tackle violence, the position of women, love and parenthood. Her first novel, Kompoun, was published in 2021. She compiled Die maan is swart (The Moon is Black, 2022), a collection of poetry by Adam Small, and has translated two of Kirsty Applebaum’s Princess Minna children’s books into Afrikaans.

Nisrine Mbarki is a writer, poet, columnist and literary translator. She writes short stories, theatre scripts and poetry, and translates poetry from Arabic into Dutch. Her poems and columns regularly appear in Dutch literary magazines. She has appeared at festivals such as Poetry International, Globale in Bremen, Writers Unlimited, Read My World, the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp, and the Nacht van de Poëzie (Night of Poetry). She is co-founder and artistic director of the theatre company Landgenoten, for which she wrote Club Paradis (2016), which was staged in the Netherlands and Germany. Her debut poetry collection oeverloos (Endless) was published in 2022.

XILLAN, a Surinamese-Dutch singer-songwriter and artist, creates alternative R&B that is challenging in its intimacy. XILLAN doesn’t allow himself to be limited by the alternative R&B label and embraces his influences with passion and conviction. His music is characterized by duality and a unique, poetic view of the world. Comparable to artists such as Omar Apollo, Steve Lacy and Daniel Caesar and reflecting XILLAN’s own multicultural background, he creates a unique sound that reflects the current age. In 2022, he released his debut EP Crowning Gods, a story of transforming darkness into hope and confidence. The work draws inspiration from XILLAN’s roots and transforms it into four cross-genre tracks