From Heritage to Cultural Entrepreneurship: These Are the Winners of the Ultimas 2023
Thirteen Flemish artists or organisations have been awarded an Ultima for their achievements in the socio-cultural sector.
www.the-low-countries.com
High Road to Culture in Flanders and the Netherlands
Thirteen Flemish artists or organisations have been awarded an Ultima for their achievements in the socio-cultural sector.
Hester Velmans excites us for a ‘gripping, shocking, upsetting and gross’ novel by Lucas Rijneveld, winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize, and for the last book by Herman Franke, who died far too early.
Every character navigates between conflicting desires in Lucas Rijneveld's second novel. It all makes My Heavenly Favourite even more claustrophobic than The Discomfort of Evening, Rijneveld’s debut novel, which brought him international acclaim.
Holland has nailed just about every Dutch cliché you can imagine. That’s Holland, Michigan, in case you were wondering.
For Ilke Cop the role of an artist in a crumbling world is to create something from nothing.
In his third novel, Jaap Robben once again shows himself to be one of the most subtle novelists in the Dutch-speaking world.
The Rijksmuseum is exhibiting around fifty of Frans Hals' best works. This seventeenth-century master could transform smears of paint into striking portraits like no other.
The Amsterdam pop group Nits is celebrating their anniversary with a tour and an EP that sounds as timeless as it is stimulating. Their intelligent pop music sounds both refined and very European.
The American Revolution had a significant impact on the Dutch Republic. Not least thanks to Thomas Jefferson, who passed on his political ideals to Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, the drafter of the Dutch constitution.
Dutch linguist Marc van Oostendorp is still astonished by what ChatGPT. Nonetheless, he has seamlessly integrated this artificial intelligence into his work.
Literary translator Alice Tetley-Paul makes a plea for an iconic
children's book and a novel cycle that caused a minor craze in the Netherlands.
Mauritshuis in The Hague is paying tribute to Roelant Savery, painter of the Netherlands’ first floral still life, and of the legendary (extinct) dodo.
In the Roaring Twenties, bourgeois Holland was awakened by a new musical wind from the West: jazz!
The glorification of reproductive sexuality, the crusade against abortion, the cult of alpha masculinity: a wind of sexual conservatism, with a hint of the extreme right, is blowing through the Low Countries.
Artists and designers are increasingly embracing the sensory properties and sustainable potential of microorganisms. Say hello to bioluminescent fungi and microbial weaving.
Comparing the Flemish Canon to the Canon of the Netherlands, historian Rolf Falter concludes that both canons are a collection of standalone stories, whereby contemporary political sensibilities and a quite nationalistic approach have influenced the selection of the subjects.
The role of many LGBTQ+ festivals goes way beyond simply screening films.
Shimanto Reza wants to whet your reading appetite with an innovative novel that inspired a generation of Flemish writers and a story about the shadowy world of bitcoins and cryptocurrency.
What can the National Holocaust Museum say that has not been said before by dozens of other Dutch museums and memorial sites concerning the history and the persecution of the Jews?
According to the jury, Lanoye’s writing has been a ‘linguistic virtuoso spectacle’ for forty years.
Museum MORE specializes in a movement that has long been ignored: realism. If that is not enough reason to travel to Gelderland, there is always the world's largest collection of works by Carel Willink.
After Harry Mulisch, Tommy Wieringa, Lucas Rijneveld and Jaap Robben, Jente Posthuma is the fifth Dutch author to be nominated for this prestigious literature prize.
Today, prostitution has been legalised in the Netherlands and decriminalised in Belgium, but the normalisation of ‘sex for money’ is far from a reality.
After years of renovation, Brussels' former Stock Exchange building has been transformed into a grand venue for lovers of architecture, archaeology and beer.
The Netherlands was long considered more progressive in cinema than Belgium. Surprisingly enough, film censorship was more robust in the Netherlands than in Belgium.
How do you describe a fragrance when you lack the words for it? Linguist Marten van der Meulen sees possibilities in dialects and non-European languages.
Since 1945 The Netherlands and Belgium have often been frontrunners on the world stage when it comes to sexuality. But a certain sense of unease has always lingered and seems to be growing these days.