City2Cities Abroad

With Miquel Bulnes and Hagar Peeters

Prague en Barcelona are guestcities of C2C 2012. During the festival from the 21st till the 29th of April we invite authors from Prague and Barcelona to the Netherlands. But City2Cities makes the exchange work both ways within the programme City2Cities Abroad. In the months before the festival, two Dutch authors visit Prague and Barcelona to explore the literary scenes and to promote Dutch literature. This year’s C2C Abroad authors are poet Hagar Peeters who will visit Prague and author Miquel Bulnes who is to travel to Barcelona.

Miquel Bulnes
Miquel Bulnes (1976) is half Dutch, half Spanish. He studied medicine at Utrecht University and is now a medical practitioner and researcher. In 2003, he published his debut Zorg (Care), which was received with praise from both press and audience. In 2005, his second novel Lab was published, followed by Attaque! in 2007. In 2011 Bulnes wrote the grand work Het bloed in onze aderen (The blood in our veins). This magnum opus about the war in the Rif Mountains in 1921 was written partly in Spain and partly in the Netherlands. The novel received much praised and made it to the Long List for the Libris Literature Prize.

Hagar Peeters
Hagar Peeters (1972) had her breakthrough in the Netherlands with her spectacular performance at the Double Talk festival in 1997. Her first poetry collection Genoeg gedicht over de liefde vandaag was published in 1999. The poems in this collection are subtle, sometimes satiric, in which rhyme and form support the performance beautifully. Peeters has won several literary prices for her oeuvre, amongst which the prestigious J.C. Bloemprice for her second collection Koffers zeelucht. In 2008 she even made it to the shortlist of becoming Poet Laureate of the Netherlands. Her latest collection of poems Wasdom was published in 2011. In it she combined poems she wrote in her youth with more recently written poems.

City2Cities Abroad
In March 2012 Hagar Peeters en Miquel Bulness pay a four-day visit to Prague and Barcelona for City2Cities Abroad. They will report their experiences in blogs on www.city2cities.nl. Their trips will also be made into two mini documentaries that are screened on the opening night of City2Cities on the 21st of April. Peeters and Bulnes will also be present this evening to talk about their trips.