Mission Statement

City2Cities: International Literature Days Utrecht is an international literature festival. Each year City2Cities, in short C2C, connects the city of Utrecht with two other literary cities. 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. We invite the renowned writers from these cities to the Netherlands, search for new talent and try to discover on which points Utrecht and her two guestcities differ and overlap. We focus explicitly on the three cities, but these cities also represent a country, a culture and a language area. There will be debates about urban literary culture with writers and translators from the three cities, stories and poems will be translated and in the fringe we will also program theatre, music and movies.

The two guest cities are primarily chosen based on their qualities as literary cities. The cities appear in many novels and poems and they have a flourishing writing- and publishing scene. Like Utrecht, they also have to have an university. Their geographical site can be a point of interest as well; cities in contrasting areas have our preference. This way City2Cities creates axes through Europe. In the period leading up to Utrecht as Cultural Capital 2018 the maintenance and expansion of the network created by City2Cities is essential. In 2018 there will be a web of eighteen lines. Eighteen lines drawn to eighteen different cities all over Europe.

After the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 Utrecht is once again host of countless international guests during the literature days. Then Utrecht opened up her houses, theatres and pubs for the important guests, but wasn’t allowed to utter a single word herself. “Nous traiterons de vous, chez vous, sans vous,”, the French envoy supposedly said. “We talk about you, with you, without you.” We won’t have that said about us again. This time the floor is explicitly to Utrecht and we are more than happy to enter the debate with our European colleagues. With the rich literary history of the city, the leading modern writers and poets, publishers and bookstores City2Cities shows Utrecht to the world as thé city of literature.