The Dedica Festival in Italy has been a great success. On the Media page you will find a number of photographs of German writer and philosopher Rüdiger Safranski and Dutch photographer Eddy Posthuma de Boer.

At the festival, publisher Emilia Lodigliani of Iperborea became a Knight in Order of Orange-Nassau, a royal award for people who earned special merits for Dutch society. She is the editor and publisher of many Dutch writers, amongst others Cees Nooteboom, Hella Haasse, Kader Abdolah, Multatuli and J. Slauerhoff. So far, she has brought out nine different books by Cees Nooteboom in Italian.

Also, Le Monde published an excellent review of the French editions of Tumba’s and ’s Nachts komen de vossen (Foxes in the Night) which you can read here.

The 17th edition of DEDICA Festival will be held in Pordenone, Italy, from 12 to 26 March 2011. DEDICA is a festival focusing on an eminent figure of the cultural world without aiming at celebrating him/her, but rather with the stated objective of deepening the knowledge on the artist and on the development of their career. The author’s work is analyzed through different artistic languages: from book presentations to theatre shows, from meetings to concerts, from theme conferences to movie shows, from recitals to exhibitions. Along with the main theme, DEDICAFestival also offers special events specifically targeted at high school students and undergraduates.

The event was launched for the first time in 1995 and since then it has hosted writers such as Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi, Amin Maalouf, Vassilis Vassilikos, Assia Djebar, Anita Desai, Amos Oz, Nadine Gordimer, Paul Auster and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

The 2011 edition’s protagonist will be the Dutch writer, poet and essayist Cees Nooteboom, acclaimed by international critics as one of the most important and original contemporary European writers. This edition’s theme will be “The quest for something and somewhere else”, whereby the journey is not only seen as a movement across the concrete reality of geographic space in order to reach other places inhabited by other people, but is also a way of rediscovering forgotten inner worlds, meeting with one’s inner self and finding new research paths”.

The programme is rich in appointments and distinguished guests; it includes poetry readings, meetings, the presentation of a new book being published in Italy in the wake of the festival, Avevo mille vite e ne ho preso una sola (Iperborea), theatre shows inspired by Nooteboom’s work, such as his Heinz short story and the essay Verso Santiago, the showing of Heinz Peter Schwerfel’s documentary Hotel Nooteboom, Eddy Posthuma de Boer and Simone Sassen’s photo shows, as well as paintings exhibitions displaying Max Neumann’s work, a special publication called Dedica a Cees Nooteboom, featuring an interview to the writer by the cultural journalist Piet Pyrins, critical reviews by Laszlo Földény, Alberto Manguel and Fulvio Ferrari and a piece of writing by Cees Nooteboom called Un incontro a Recanati.

DEDICAFestival was awarded the Silver Medal by Giorgio Napolitano, President of the Italian Republic, an acknowledgement that will be presented to Cees Nooteboom on 12 March during the opening ceremony, in the presence of Italian authorities and the Dutch Ambassador in Italy, Mr Alphonsus Hermanus Maria Stoelinga.

More information: www.dedicafestival.it.