On Tuesday 25 March, Abbie Boutkabout, Melissa Giardina and Ibe Rossel join presenter Ruth Joos for a new edition of ‘Uitgelezen’. March is a busy month in the literary field: it is Youth Book Month, there is the awarding of the Boon Literature Prize, but also the Made in China Festival that puts Chinese literature in the spotlight every year, the Passa Porta Festival for which international writers travel to Belgium. An excellent time to show what literature can do.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - 'Dream Count'
We begin with new work of literary royalty, newly translated into Dutch: ‘Dream Count’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A grand novel about four women looking back on their lives, the choices they made and the choices life made in their place. Knowing Adichie, her characters have won a long stay in many a reader's heart after 500 pages.
Eline Van Wieren - 'Popcorn donut kaassouflé'
Another character that you'll keep close to your heart, because she's touchingly sassy and mercilessly vulnerable: Kato from ‘Popcorn donut kaassoufflé’ by Eline van Wieren. A Dutch debut about a young woman with a lot of hunger, a lot of body and even more sadness. Kato's experiences in the eating disorder clinic and the library where she works make for dryly comic social criticism and have a high entertainment content. A book you will read in one sitting.
Ling Yu - 'Daughters'
The latest book on the table is ‘Daughters’ by Chinese poet Ling Yu. Following the death of her mother, Ling Yu began work on this collection in which she weaves a philosophical and sensitive weave of themes such as illness and impermanence, mythology and tradition, mothers and daughters. With ‘Daughters’, she knows better than anyone else how to depict what it is like to be a woman in a patriarchal society.