European literary talent assembles in Brussels

From January 13th to 16th, 140 literary talents from all over Europe came together in Brussels for the four-year European talent development course: CELA (Connecting Emerging Literary Artists). Rie Van Den Berghe, intern at deBuren, mingled with the authors and translators.

CELA #2 start off

On Monday January 13th in Brussels, the second edition of CELA launched. (Read everything about the first edition here). CELA, or Connecting Emerging Literary Artists, is a unique four-year European talent development course that supports a new generation of literary creators and offers the smaller languages in Europe a better chance in the literary world. Young writers and translators get a boost by giving them the opportunity to work together intensively with other aspiring European participants.

During the introduction week, that was hosted by deBuren and Passa Porta, 30 authors, 80 translators and 6 literary professionals from all across Europe gathered in Brussels to get to know the course and each other. In a great deal of workshops and master classes, writers and translators effectively got to work with each other’s work. ‘I have never had an opportunity to actually meet a writer I translated, and CELA gave me the possibility to talk about text with a writer in person,’ said Ana Popovic from Serbia.


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Finale: The voice of a new generation

The five-day congress ended in Brussels’s city theatre, KVS, with a programme that the literary professionals put together during the introduction week: The voice of a new generation. After the entertaining introduction by Adriano Pugno of Scuola Holden and Dutch participant Nikki Dekker, authors read from their own work, had a talk with their translators (who in turn answered in their own language) and translators talked about the art of their profession.