Marjolijn van Heemstra
Poet, novelist, and playwright Marjolijn van Heemstra (b. 1981) holds a master’s degree in religion. Her first poetry collection, 'If Moses Had Gone On Questioning' (2009) won the Jo Peters Poetry Prize. She debuted as a novelist with 'The Last of the Aedemas' (2012).
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She has been fascinated by space and space travel for years. Since 2019, she has been covering Space in all its facets for online journalism platform De Correspondent. She was previously a columnist for the Dutch newspaper Trouw for many years. Her novel In Search of a Name (2017) was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize, was awarded the BNG Bank Literature Prize, and has been published in eight languages.
More Marjolijn van Heemstra
And His Name Is
Marjolijn van Heemstra has a conversation with her partner about what to name their child. She’s pregnant and, as the chapter title explains, still has 27 weeks to go. Her partner tells her that a name always fits in the end, like a leather shoe that takes on the shape of the foot. Marjolijn thinks it’s the other way round: ‘You grow into your name. The name is the foot.’
In Lightyears No One Is in a Hurry
3:32 a.m., the hottest summer on record, and writer, poet and theatre maker Marjolijn van Heemstra cannot get to sleep. She lies in bed, scrolling through stories of rage and injustice, the climate crisis and political protest, her thoughts endlessly orbiting identity debates and the growing divisions around her. She cannot see a way out, a perspective beyond her daily life, a future for her children beyond the brokenness of the present. But then she stumbles on the ‘The Hubble Ultra Deep Field’, an image of billions of stars scattered in the darkness like countless broken fragments, and she has a realisation: we are surrounded by so much more than the daily stream of apocalyptic news.