(Augustus, 2009, 138 pages)

Anton Valens’ characters invariably attempt to make an unknown world their own. In his widely praised debut Meesters in de hygiëne (‘Master in Hygiene’, 2004) the central character is an art student who works as cleaner for lonely elderly people and becomes caught up in their life stories. In the novella Vis (‘Fish’) we meet an unemployed artist who having signed up with a fishing boat that trawls the bottom of the Wadden Sea for plaice, dab and sole soon has to revise any romantic notion he had about fishing.

(Augustus, 2012, 320 pages)

This is an unforgettable story whose author sustains a precarious balance between cheerful nonsense and high seriousness. The setting is Groningen, a city in the far north of the Netherlands, a buzzing centre of life amid endless flat meadows. The 500-year-old Martini Tower serves as an urban landmark and the people are sober, their dour character proverbial. Groningen, where Valens lived for many years, is conceived as a form of isolation, of being cut off.

(Atlas Contact, 2022, 112 pages)

Anton Valens is the author of a small, but finely wrought body of work centred on antiheroes and their constant struggles with life. In the posthumously published novella A Wagon Full of Devils he lampoons the pretentious art world while at the same time showing how much beauty there is to be found in things other people tend to dismiss as banal or insignificant.