By Alia Papageorgiou
Artistic Director and Founder of the Writers Festival of Belgium
Now in its fourth year, on 11th October, the Writers festival of Belgium took place in Namur at the MusAfrica Namur, with great help from La Celestine, the public library, joined to the same building by a walkway.
Authors, poets, visitors, writers, curious individuals came together to hear from Namur based author Sarah Bailleux, Belgian authors Claire Ruwet and Jean Jauniaux on living and writing locally but also on universal topics such as Jazz, medicine, euthanasia, the pandemic and its effects, the occupation of Belgium and a specific maternity ward which was used for historical background in Sarah Bailleux’s book, up for a book prize currently ‘Les Silences des meres’.
Jean Jauniaux’s book also deals with education and refugees in a walk through a Brussels re-imagined by a fictive author who, by going in search of the nighttime and dark Brussels, ends up helping those fleeing by the seaside at the North Sea.
Like a dream and responding to the call of the theme of this year’s festival, Clarie Ruwet stood and sang ‘Cry me a river’ for the audience and moved us all to whisper along or tap our feet. A real treat.
Ambassador Dionysios Kalamvrezos talked us through his awakening to science fiction and how methodical and meticulous such work can be, and the writing of his latest novel, ‘Virtual Nightmare’, which presciently deals with an AI taking over many people’s lives in New York, under a totalitarian tech system of the future.
American author Reah Bravo shared with us the making of her MeToo personally reflective book ‘Complicit’, in which she looks at the dynamics and historical narrative of where gender imbalance takes hold, coming out of a TV show as a writer in the US, where many women did legally sue the presenter.
We had the thrill of Kevin Chan joining us an internationally acclaimed author of ‘Ghost Town’ who lives in Berlin and who explained the Taiwanese tradition of a summer month of pleasing and feeding the ghosts in your town as a hell hole has opened up for the ‘ghost month’ but his literary ‘Ghost Town’ he said was about going home to face your past including harsh truths, homophobia, and other ‘ghosts’ of growing up on the island. A super lively sharing experience.
Mimi Kunz presented her book on art + poetry making, like and documenting our ‘Mother Tongue’ life through the body.
We had two workshops with Dimitra Didangelou, leading participants through therapy in writing, and Miksi, well known in Brussels for her slam poetry, led us through a workshop on ‘finding the words for grief’.
The winners of the Short Stories of Belgium 2025 award were announced, and they are Josje Weusten, Dimitrios Politis, and Titi Kusumandari.
The next edition will be held in Antwerp in October 2026.
