Arjan Visser
Arjan Visser (b. 1961) earned journalistic renown through an interview series which has been running in the Trouw daily newspaper since 1998. Dutch people from different backgrounds, famous and unknown, are asked to respond to the themes of the Ten Commandments, which produces surprising confessions about faith and morals. Visser’s fascination for this material was reflected in his first book, De laatste dagen (The Last Days, 2003), which takes a farming family and describes in tangible terms how their minds are captivated by an itinerant preacher. This book was nominated for the AKO Literature Prize and received the Marten Toonder/Geertjan Lubberhuizen Award as well as the Anton Wachter Prize. Visser has been highly praised for his capacity to balance compassion and irony, a talent he made the most of to portray the vulnerable characters in his second novel, Hemelval (Fall from Heaven, 2006). In 2009 he published Paganinipark, followed by his fourth novel Hotel Linda in 2012.