Passa Porta invite des écrivains étrangers à séjourner en résidence en Belgique. L'occasion leur est ainsi donnée de travailler sur un manuscrit et de découvrir la culture et la littérature belge et flamande. Passa Porta envoie aussi des auteurs en résidence à l'étranger.
"I had to leave home to finish my story, but I couldn't go just anywhere. I wanted to put to the test my memories of a country that had felt so strangely and undeservedly familiar to me on the many trips I made there dozen years ago: my Belgium, a Belgium that was, like the castle-studded rolling landscape in the background of a Flemish painting, always more the work of the artist's imagination than of empirical fact."
