Every two years, the Passa Porta International House of Literature invites you to its multilingual festival, the biggest literary event in the Benelux. The tenth edition of the Passa Porta Festival (program here) invites you on a voyage of discovery of contemporary literature around an intriguing theme: “Ghosts”.

Writers, musicians and artists will share their visions of ghosts. They’ll explore passages through time and space, illuminate the shadows of history and plunge into apocalyptic images of the future, questioning the foretold spectralization of human relations and the challenges of artificial intelligence.

About time: meeting with Solvej Balle, Andrés Barba and Agnieszka Szpila

A round-table discussion on three books that defy time: Le Volume du temps by Danish author Solvej Balle, Le Dernier Jour de la vie antérieure by Spanish author Andrés Barba and Heksy by Polish author Agnieszka Szpila. In these three novels, the authors make a strange pact with time, which is no longer linear, but plastic: subject to loops, gaps, stops and journeys into the past. Their characters become toys of time.

March 29, 2025
13:30 – 14:30
Bursschouwburg

Meet the Author: Agnieszka Szpila

Agnieszka Szpila a rising figure in Polish ecofeminism, is a writer, screenwriter and activist. The holder of a degree in cultural studies, she made her literary debut in 2015 with the story Łebki od Szpilki. Her first novel, Bardo (2018), soon became a bestseller. Her second novel, Heksy, was a finalist for the prestigious Nike Literary Prize (Poland) and has been sold in eight languages, adapted for the stage and enjoyed immense critical and public success.

Heksy is an unclassifiable novel, full of pulsating, vital energy.

New voices from Eastern Europe – Marta Hermanowicz, Myroslav Laiuk and Iulian Bocai

This meeting is part of the Connecting Emerging Literary Artists (CELA) project, a development program for the new generation of European literary voices in 11 countries, including Poland, Ukraine and Romania.

Three authors will share the stage with their Dutch and Flemish translators: Marta Hermanowicz (Poland), Myroslav Laiuk (Ukraine) and Iulian Bocai (Romania).

Accompanied by their translators, Małgosia Briefjes, Charlotte van Rooden and Roman Nesterenco, will read excerpts from their books in the original and in Dutch, and discuss the importance of translations in disseminating literature.

Marta Hermanowicz (b. 1982) holds degrees in political science from the University of Szczecin and the Tadeusz Gadacz School of Philosophy, as well as in art history from the Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Collegium Civitas. Winner of numerous awards for her short stories, in 2024 published her first book, Koniec (Het Einde in Dutch).

Publisher PL: Wydawnictwo ArtRage, 2024
NL Publisher: Het Einde, 2024

March 30, 2025
16:30 – 17:30 
MAD Brussels (café)

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