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eastside hosts dutch writers

All this week, Eastside is hosting three highly acclaimed writers and poetry teachers from the Netherlands as part of our European poetry competition Y'Poetry. We are delighted to welcome Ineke Riem, Dasja Koot and Jacques Brooijmans to the UK. The writers have come to London from Amsterdam to run inspirational poetry workshops for Eastside at schools in Bexley, Harrow, Haringey, Lewisham and Redbridge.

Taking 'The City' as their theme, three hundred students from across the capital will be writing poetry about their own experiences of city life, throughout the week. Thirty London teenagers will go on to perform at our Y'Poetry Revue at the Unicorn Theatre on 21st February and eight young Londoners will then be selected to represent their school and their country at the Y'Poetry finals in Amsterdam this April.  

Eastside's Y'Poetry workshops are taking place across London from 30th January - 3rd February 2012. Year 9 and 10 students from St. Catherine's Catholic Girls School (Bexley); Harrow High School (Harrow); Fortismere School (Haringey); Haberdasher Aske's Hatcham College (Lewisham) and Woodbridge High School (Redbridge) will explore how 'The City' has been written about in European poetry through an anthology of poems from Belgium, Holland, Germany and the UK. The anthology has been especially produced for Y'Poetry and is translated into three languages.

* Jacques Brooijmans has written eight 'young adult'- novels, which are published by the Belgian-Dutch publishing firm Clavis. As well as writing he is a poetry lecturer, a drama teacher, a script writer and a youth theatre director.  

* Dasja Koot started writing poetry when she was thirteen. Her love of drama and language led her to study Italian literature and theatre, since then she has combined her two great passions. Dasja works as a stage director at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam and as an editor in chief she worked for several years for a Dutch Broadcasting Network (NTR/SchoolTV), participating in literature and language programs. She teaches creative writing widely in both primary and secondary schools.

* Ineke Riem studied Dutch literature in Groningen (NL) and London, she holds an MA in Education from the University of Amsterdam. She's taught Dutch and Creative Writing at schools across the Netherlands. Ineke's poems have been published in several literary magazines and she is currently working on her first novel.

Eastside is delighted to be a partner in Y'Poetry an initiative of School der Poëzie in Amsterdam which has been funded with support from the European Union Culture Programme. Other partners include; Villanella in Antwerp and Theater an der Parkaue in Berlin.