Manon Uphoff

Manon Uphoff (1962) is widely praised for her terse style and the condensed form in which she tells her stories. Even though the short story and novella are the forms at which she excels, Uphoff has also written a fine novel, Gemis (Loss, 1997) which, said the weekly journal Vrij Nederland, ‘Impresses us on every page.’ ‘The spirited and original style gives the story its lightness, the flexibility of the images gives it its weight.’ In 2002 the first of a series of novellas was published, De vanger (The Catcher). For Falling is like Flying (2019) Uphoff has been awarded the Charlotte Köhler Prijs 2020.

The Bastard Son

(Podium, 2004, 90 pages)

The Bastard Son is situated in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time that Uphoff evokes in glorious multicolour. The writer sets the conflict of biological and cultural rights against the background of an aristocratic milieu in decline, with the bastard son of a landowner fighting for the right of the firstborn, pitted against his younger half-brother.

Falling is like Flying

(Querido, 2019, 192 pages)

‘Reader, I didn’t want to tell this story,’ begins Manon Uphoff’s fourth novel. That angry women are often dismissed as vile, crazy, hysterical is precisely the starting point for this book about a father who sexually abuses his four daughters from early childhood, based on the author’s own experiences.

Author

Manon Uphoff

The Bastard Son

Falling is like Flying

Translations