Olivia Laing, one of last year’s guests at ILFU, has called Maggie Nelson: “One of the most exciting writers at the moment.” And she’s not the only person who thinks so: since Nelson broke through with her novel The Argonauts, a book whose form and content both upended conventional ideas about identity, forms of community and narrative formats, Nelson has been an institution among writers and readers alike. Her books are ...

Before The Argonauts, she wrote the phenomenal anthology Bluets (2009), 240 poetic fragments that can be read as Nelson’s variations on the colour blue, an obsession expressed as thoughts and sentences exploding in colour. She recently published On Freedom, a bundle of essays on the irrepressible desire for freedom, and the impossible paradoxes that the desire entails in contexts like art, sex, drugs and the climate. 

We are honoured that Nelson has chosen the ILFU for her first visit to the Netherlands, and especially that she will be at the official opening of the ILFU on 23 September! Maggie will be interviewed by writer and Nelson-watcher Niña Weijers, and will receive a joyous introduction by writer Fleur Pierets.

The event will be hosted by ILFU in partnership with Uitgeverij Atlas-Contact.