Anne Provoost is a Flemish writer, who was elected a member of The Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature in 2003. She is an ambassador for Hans Christian Andersen Year in 2005 as well as a PEN-member, and in 2008 she will spend the month November in Amsterdam, close to her publisher Querido.
Anne Provoost was born in Belgium in 1964 and studied literature at the University of Leuven (Louvain). Her first novel, My Aunt is a Pilot Whale, she wrote while living in Minneapolis, USA. The book was published in 1991 and translated into English three years later. It was the first book on sexual child abuse for a young audience produced in the Low Countries.
Her second novel, Falling (1994) was made into an English spoken feature film that came out in the fall of 2001, starring Jill Clayburgh and Alice Krige. In 1997 followed the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast in The Rose and the Swine, transforming the familiar story into a saga of guilt and penance, mercy and justice. She again retells a familiar story In the Shadow of the Ark, published in Dutch as De arkvaarders in 2001. It recounts the experiences of Noah and the ark, seen from the perspective of a teenage girl who was not ‘chosen’ to be on the ship.
But Provoost also writes essays on literature in general and on literature for children. So here’s the Bad News, The Child as Antagonist and Beminde ongelovigen on the subject of atheism are her most recent essays. In de zon kijken is her latest novel.
Anne Provoost lives in Antwerp, Belgium, with her husband and three children. This is the first time she holds the position of writer in residence in a foreign city. On Tuesday November 4 PEN-Nederland organises an evening around the theme the new myths in the Goethe Institute in Rotterdam. Provoost is a panel member. Wednesday November 19th, Provoost is invited by the University of Amsterdam as a guest lecturer on the subject of youth literature.
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