27 December 2012 - Michele Hutchison
In the run up to the tour I’ll be interviewing three Dutch-English translators who have translated High Impact authors. First up is Sam Garrett. Sam Garrett (b. 1956) is an American who has lived in the Netherlands for more than thirty years. He currently divides his time between Amsterdam and the French Pyrenees.
20 December 2012 - Michele Hutchison
This week five of the writers along with representatives from the Flemish and Dutch literary foundations and artistic director Rosie Goldsmith, met in Amsterdam to discuss High Impact. I’ve been reading their books for the last month, now I have the chance to meet two of the writers for the first time and to catch up with three I’d met before to find out what everyone is hoping to gain from this literary delegation of Dutch and Flemish writers to the UK.
6 December 2012 - Michele Hutchison
As preparations for High Impact go into turbo drive I take my seat as tour blogger. High Impact: Literature from the Low Countries – to give its full title – is a festival and tour in which six top Dutch-language writers from Flanders and The Netherlands will give readings in six cities around the UK. Today I’d like to introduce the concept and thinking behind the whole project. Here’s my interview with the Artistic Director Rosie Goldsmith about what it all means.
22 August 2012 - Mireille Berman
If you walk into a Dutch bookshop – there are more than 1.500 in the Netherlands, struggling to survive – as a tourist, you will probably experience the joys of recognition. The inevitable international bestsellers – E.L. James, Suzanne Collins, Nicci French, Jonas Jonasson, Stephen King and Karin Slaughter – are all there, and selling very well. These titles, mostly translated from English, share their space on the bestseller tables with the occasional original Dutch title, like Paulien Cornelisse’s quirky observations of Dutch vernacular, and successful thrillers, all written by blond, high-heeled women authors (and if they happen to be male, they wisely use a female alias). The rest are sports books, mostly about football, which is very popular in the Netherlands.
16 July 2012 - Victor Schiferli
With the death of Rutger Kopland (1934-2012), Dutch literature has lost one of its most beloved and widely-read poets. Kopland made his debut in the mid-1960s in the literary journal Tirade. Shortly thereafter he published his first collection of poetry, Onder het vee (Among Cattle, 1966), which includes his now legendary poem ‘Under the Apple Tree’. The tone was gentle, searching and melancholy; the choice of words, clear and direct.
6 July 2012 - Victor Schiferli
In Gerrit Komrij (1944-2012) Dutch literature has lost one of its most versatile and productive writers, an original voice that went against the grain both in poetry and in prose. As well as a poet, novelist and essayist, he was an anthologist and translator. His essayistic work won him the P.C. Hooft Prize in 1993 and he was awarded many other distinctions over the years.
22 June 2012 - Ronelda S. Kamfer
My experience with the literary scene is that of one gigantic bore, writers come to events to sell their books to other writers, they drink too much wine and that makes them whine. They discuss their latest projects and admire each other. That is what I thought until I attended the Podium 15th celebrations. My publisher Joost Nijsen, invited some of his writers and we all read from our works. I brought my nine month old and she sat quietly with my husband in the dark night club inside the Trouw building.
5 June 2012 - Ronelda S. Kamfer
We climb up the stairs and the first thing I notice is the large, framed photo of Andy Warhol in a supermarket with a shopping trolley full of All American consumer products. My first thought is, oh, so this is that kind of place. What kind of place I mean isn’t immediately clear to me. And at present I’m too exhausted to care, so I file the thought away somewhere in my brain, like a letter back in its envelope to be read later. Right this moment I’m too busy climbing the staircase that’s making me feel like Judy on the bell tower in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Someone reassures me that it’s a typical Dutch staircase. It’s typically Dutch to have stairs that are as narrow as the road to heaven and as dangerously spiraling as the one to hell.
3 May 2012 - Victor Schiferli
We are proud to present eleven new titles in Dutch and Flemish fiction, all novels published in the past few months. Shortlisted for the prestigious Gouden Uil and praised by many reviewers, Stephan Enter’s breakthrough novel Grip tells the compelling story of four friends - three boys, one girl - who share a fascination for mountaineering and are reunited after twenty years. The book has become a steady bestseller, with foreign rights already sold to Germany, Italy and Norway.