KU Leuven Welcomes Koen Peeters as Fifth Writer-in-Residence
For the fifth year in a row, KU Leuven is encouraging a love for literature by appointing an in-house writer. Next academic year that will be author Koen Peeters. As the university’s resident writer, he will teach the subject of ‘creative writing’, but also give guest lectures, compose occasional texts and think about writing as an embodied, physical practice. And there will be an exhibition in spring 2025 where he shows his preliminary research, sources and method, simultaneously ironic and aesthetic, together with a live writers’ room in BAC ART LAB.
Koen Peeters studied communication sciences and anthropology at KU Leuven. He made his literary debut in 1988 with the novel ‘Conversaties met K.’, for which he received the New Yang Prize. This was followed by twelve other novels, novellas, a poetry collection and numerous nominations and prizes. He received the F. Borderwijk Prize for his novel ‘The Flowers’, the E. du Perron Prize for ‘A Thousand Hills’ and both the ECI Literature Prize and the ECI Readers’ Prize for ‘The Human Healer’. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Slovenian. Peeters enjoys and frequently collaborates with fellow writers or contemporary artists, which always results in separate publications (including about Stijn Streuvels, Jef Geys, as curator for the literary magazine DW B…)
“With Koen Peeters, we have chosen a writer this year for whom literature is created at the crossroads of major and minor histories. His love for knowledge is evident from the different forms – art, anthropology, astronomy, etc. – that are discussed in his novels,” explains Liesbet Heyvaert, dean of the Faculty of Arts. Peeters’ latest novel ‘Georges’, for example, deals with fictional encounters with the name Georges as a common thread. For example, he takes you to Ostend where a postal worker meets the writer James Joyce, to the city park in Leuven where the young Paula talks to the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître, all the way to Georgia.
The versatile curiosity in Koen’s work fits well with our university, and we cannot imagine a better guest writer in the coming festive year.
Liesbeth Heyvaert, dean of the Faculty of Arts
“With the appointment of Koen Peeters, KU Leuven clearly continues to focus on the intertwining between art and science,” adds Bart Raymaekers, rectoral advisor on culture. “Art and literature really make the university a place where all forms of knowledge have a place. The original voice and pen of Koen Peeters brings an unpublished sound of its own.”
Creative writing
As writer-in-residence, Koen Peeters follows in the footsteps of Maud Vanhauwaert, Bart Moeyaert, Annelies Verbeke and Saskia De Coster. Next academic year he will teach the subject ‘creative writing’ at the Faculty of Arts. The course is part of various master’s programs at the faculty, but is also open to other students. Based on a motivation letter, twenty students are selected who will work with the author for a semester on various themes.
Especially in the anniversary year of 600 years of the university, I am fascinated by the living and historical universe of auditoriums, labs, offices and libraries in Leuven. What space does a writer need? What does a writer’s Wunderkammer look like?
Koen Peeters
Peeters will collect answers to these questions throughout the coming academic year and will complete his project in April 2025. Then you can see the author live at work for a week in his own Wunderkammer in BAC ART LAB , the contemporary arts workshop of KU Leuven.