thank you for 2025!
2025 was a year packed with literary highlights for the International House of Literature Passa Porta and we look back on them with fondness.
Spring was dominated by the tenth Passa Porta Festival, during which, inspired by our theme ‘Ghosts’, dozens of authors and artists from Belgium and abroad turned Brussels into the literary capital of Europe for the space of a weekend. Alongside thousands of visitors, we got to enjoy stimulating lectures, conversations and interviews with Jeanette Winterson, Sandro Veronesi, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Eduardo Halfon, Merethe Lindstrøm, Bregje Hofstede, P.F. Thomése, In Koli Jean Bofane, Paul Murray, Lara Taveirne, Lize Spit, Charlotte Van den Broeck, Stefan Hertmans and many more.
After this wonderful feast of the imagination, we picked up our regular course of business, giving a platform to leading authors in the remaining three seasons of 2025. South African Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee held a packed theatre of La Monnaie in awe with a remarkable lecture while American-Nigerian superstar Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie held two thousand people spellbound at Bozar.
We also welcomed Arundhati Roy, Caryl Phillips, Samanta Schweblin, Rita Bullwinkel, Adèle Yon, Alice Zeniter, Sunil Amrith, Laura Vazquez, Peter Buwalda, Beatriz Serrano and Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others.
We organized another Flirt Flamand, introducing such Flemish authors as Fleur Pierets, Annelies Verbeke and Michaël Olbrechts to a French-speaking audience, before doing the reverse in Mechelen with such Walloon voices as Caroline Lamarche, Lisette Lombé, Myriam Leroy and Caroline De Mulder.
New programmes were launched on Dutch-language prose (‘Verschijningen’), poetry (‘Poeticafe’) and non-fiction (‘ A Good Crisis), and literature from the Middle East (‘RIHLA’), which we will continue to develop in 2026. Ten new episodes of the Passa Podcast were released, featuring Peter Terrin, Jana Antonissen, Emy Koopman and Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad, among others.
In 2025 we were once again able to provide a temporary writing home to writers-in-residence from different corners of the world, including Solvej Balle (Denmark), Jeremy Atherton-Lin (USA), Elena Medel (Spain), Sarah-Estelle Bulle (France/Guadeloupe), Iulian Bocai (Romania) and Dato Turashvili (Georgia).
We are now taking a short break but look forward to welcoming the best of world literature to Brussels again next year. You can already save three dates: 15 January (Jesús Carrasco and Virginia Mendoza), 4 Februari (Carys Davies) and 14 March (Ocean Vuong). There will be many more wonderful surprises to come in the new year of course. The Passa Porta Bookshop will be open throughout the festive season for all your gifts. The entire Passa Porta team wishes you happy holidays and a new year filled with much (reading) pleasure.