‘Literary evening featuring Connie Palmen’

Jij zegt het.

A poignant novel about the most famous couple in modern Western literature

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath are the most famous couple in modern Western literature. In Jij zegt het, Connie Palmen lends voice to Ted Hughes, who died in 1998. Palmen lets him look back at his passionate marriage that ended on 11 February 1963 with his wife’s suicide, and at his own life, which from that time forward was wholly dominated by her death. In the numerous biographies that have since been published about Sylvia Plath, she has been assigned martyr status, with Ted Hughes relegated to the role of traitor and murderer, scorned and scolded by complete strangers and reviled by people he believed to be friends.

With understated perspicuity, Palmen describes the groom’s thoughts, fears and invocations, and the deeply tragic bond with the woman, who would determine the course of his life. Jij zegt het is a stirring novel about love and death.

Over a the course of a quarter of a century, Connie Palmen wrote five major novels, a short story, stories, essays and Logboek van een onbarmhartig jaar [“Journal of an unmerciful year”]. She has kindly accepted Saskia De Coster’s invitation to join the festival at Bozar where she will be speaking to radio broadcaster Ruth Joos about her latest novel.

BANG! Imaginative City Festival curated by Saskia De Coster

This event is part of the imaginative city festival BANG! Curated by Saskia De Coster. Due to the construction work currently being undertaken, KultuurKaffee has opted for a nomadic existence and, together with a guest curator, assembles twice a year a multidisciplinary programme of events at various locations dotted around the city of Brussels. Autumn 2015 sees author Saskia De Coster welcoming her festival guests at Bozar.