ILFU International Literature Festival Utrecht

A new ILFU edition is on its way!

ILFU is the biggest literature festival in the Netherlands, lasting two weeks, presenting over 200 authors and reaching 20,000+ visitors. The festival originated in 1980 when the first edition of the ‘Nacht van de Poëzie’ (Dutch Poetry Night) was organized in Utrecht’s 2000-seats concerthall TivoliVredenburg. Against all odds, the event presenting 8 hours of poetry until the wee small hours attracted thousands of visitors and after 40 editions still is an iconic value in the Dutch literary scene. Over the ILFU decades, the festival grew into one big celebration of literature, covering many genres, from poetry to young adult, from non fiction to spoken word, from quality films to high standard singer-songwriters and from literary theatre to narrative visual art.

In 2022, ILFU reinvented itself as an allround organization for literature, not only organizing public events, but also offering a range of courses in writing and reading (the ILFU Academy) and building an online presence on its digital platform ilfu.com. Most of the daily literary content we share on our platform is in Dutch, but you’ll also find English spoken clips of interviews with international writers, recorded during previous editions of ILFU. In the first months after the launch of the platform, we already found 1,000+ supporters of our cause and still encourage people to join our movement. Together we show that fiction matters and distribute as many literary voices as possible.

Writers who attended previous editions of ILFU include: Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Michel Houellebecq, Nick Cave, Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, György Konrád, Daniel Kehlmann, Elena Ferrante, John Irving and Salman Rushdie.