About City2Cities

International Literature Days

City2Cities is an international literature festival which connects the city of Utrecht with two other literary cities each year. This year those cities will be Barcelona & Prague. We invite the renowned writers from these cities to the Netherlands, search for new talent and try to discover where Utrecht and her two guestcities differ and overlap.

“It’s the first widely orientated international literature festival in the Netherlands,”says Rudi Wester, chairman of City2Cities and former director of the Institution Néerlandais in Paris. “We don’t aim exclusively at poetry or at a combination of literature and popmusic, but we cover all forms in which literature can appear.” The common theme running through the entire festival is the theme of ‘the city’. The 21st century is without a doubt the century of the city. What does it mean to live in the city? And how is the city portrayed in novels and poems? City2Cities gives answers to these questions by bringing together two cities in Utrecht in a literary way. In 2011 those cities were Edinburgh and Stockholm, this year the guestcities are Barcelona and Prague and in 2013 the cities will be Lisbon and Berlin.

City2Cities is a co-production of the Utrecht Foundation of Literature, the Poetry Circus, Salon Sapphire and the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University.