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Dialogue with Stefan Hertmans — Flanders’ Fields: a modest hero in the First World War

Online talk event
BelgiumBelgium

English

21 Sun 20:00 - 21:15
Online only

"War and Turpentine", based on the notebooks of Stefan Hertmans' own grandfather, relates the life and times of a modest Flemish soldier in the First World War who became a hero - but it is also the story of a young man wanting to become a great painter, a book about passion and hope, about the balance between the horror and the sublime. Moreover, this personal story reflects the greater history: the tragedy of Flanders' Fields, one of the first great killing fields in modern history.

Stefan Hertmans

STEFAN HERTMANS is an internationally acclaimed Flemish author. For more than twenty years he was a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, where he wrote novels, poems, essays, and plays. War and Turpentine was awarded the prestigious AKO Literature Prize in 2014. It was translated into Japanese in 2020.