Author

Judith Herzberg

Judith Herzberg (b. 1934) is a celebrated poet and playwright. She made her debut in the 1960s as a poet and has been writing and translating drama and screenplays since the early 1970s. For the volume Botshol (1981) she received the Jan Campert Prize; for her oeuvre she has been awarded the Joost van den Vondel Prize (1984), the Constantijn Huygens Prize (1994) and the highly prestigious P.C. Hooft Award for her poetry (1997). A recent paperback anthology of her poems Doen en laten, published in 1994, has been on the bestseller list since then.

The Poetry of Judith Herzberg

Although Herzberg’s poems find their inspiration in nature or everyday life, the poetic transformation of that experience remains her essential concern. The poems’ sophisticated form raises them above their immediate cause. ‘Ultimately it comes down to language and emotion and sound,’ she explained in an interview. ‘Writing is like a magic spell: you have to say it just like that or it will not work.’ The poet adjusts the ends of her lines and her spacing to obtain what she calls ‘dancing poems’.

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Translated books

Photo: Valti van Leeuwen
Authors and translators Writers