The three-yearly Anna Blaman Prize has been awarded to Edward van de Vendel, author of novels and poems for children and young adults. ‘To write so convincingly, movingly and thoughtfully, and yet make it look as though you just happen to have tossed something off, is the sort of thing only a literary heavyweight can do,’ the jury concluded. Van de Vendel receives a goblet and the sum of € 10,000.
The presentation of the Anna Blaman Prize will be held on 29 November 2019. In the run-up to the prize-giving ceremony, he will visit schools in Rotterdam (where Dutch writer Anna Blaman was born in 1905 and lived until her death in 1960) to make young people more aware of their literary heritage.
Edward van de Vendel works with obvious pleasure and indisputable originality on books he would no doubt have liked to read as a child. He is the kind of writer who delights everyone, no matter how young or old, and Rotterdam is right to be proud of him.
The jury was composed of chair Peter van Heemst (former municipal councillor in Rotterdam and political analyst for Vers Beton), Ester Naomi Perquin (former Poet Laureate), Vinod Singh (Rotterdam cultural professional), Feline Streekstra (Poetry International) and Yasmina Werlich (Passionate Bulkboek).
Edward van de Vendel
Edward van de Vendel is a versatile writer and translator of literature, both prose and poetry, for children and young adults. His breakthrough came in 1999 with a poetic adaptation of seventeenth-century Dutch classic Gysbrecht van Aemstel by Joost van den Vondel, for which he was awarded the prestigious Gouden Zoen. He has since won many other awards, recently including a Gouden Lijst for Oliver, the Woutertje Pieterse Prize for Stem op de okapi (Vote for the okapi), shared with illustrator Martijn van der Linden, and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis 2016 for Der Hund, den Nino nicht hatte (The dog that Nino didn’t have), together with German translator Rolf Erdorf and illustrator Anton Van Hertbruggen.
His work has been translated into more than twenty languages, including Afrikaans, Chinese, Danish, English, Estonian, French, Korean, Swazi, Tonga and Zulu, partly with the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
More information
- in our Authors database: Edward van de Vendel
- A complete list of translated works (published or in preparation) by Edward van de Vendel can be found in our translations database: vertalingendatabase.nl
- Edward van de Vendel guest writer at the University of Groningen, Fall 2019
- International website Edward van de Vendel
- or contact our children’s book specialist Agnes Vogt
