The pandemic has kept us largely confined to our homes so perhaps it should come as no surprise that the books in this selection address both the boundaries and (longed-for) connections between us.

Don’t we need them more than ever this spring of 2022, after two years of struggling with viruses? We have all had to reinvent our ways of working and communicating. And, thankfully, books have continued to serve as a solid foundation both for our pleasure and for our working lives.

When will we be able to speak of the pandemic in the past tense? Perhaps we are still in the middle, or even at the beginning of something that we cannot yet fully oversee – and still we are already tempted to look back. The same goes for me. Many of the titles in the brochure involve travel, beaten paths are abandoned, searches and quests undertaken, and it’s very tempting to see this as a sign of the times.

Modern classics are a curious phenomenon. They bring together two seemingly contradictory things: urgency and timelessness. What modern classics lose in urgency with time – as they are overtaken by other works of literature that capture the zeitgeist of their moment – they make up for in timelessness.

Mark Janssen, the illustrator we asked to create the cover image for this newly designed version of our children’s books brochure, puts it so well: Wake up! Spring is here. Look forward to new beginnings.

In this brochure, the Dutch Foundation for Literature is pleased to present well-written and much talked about non-fiction titles recently published in the Netherlands. More than ever, it has become clear that the world does not stop at national borders: the coronavirus, climate change, international conflicts affect us all, and we are kept abreast of global developments through traditional and new media. The Dutch non-fiction that we present here responds to this.

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2020.

It is clear from the growing number of translations of Dutch non-fiction titles that the genre is being recognized and valued abroad. The most important Dutch non-fiction writers are able to compete with their peers in other countries: Renate Rubinstein, for example, may well be the Dutch Joan Didion; Anton de Kom is on an equal footing with Franz Fanon; Abel Herzberg rivals Primo Levi; and Jill Lepore’s historicising of the USA is something previously done for Europe by Geert Mak.

These are challenging times for the world – and, by extension, for poetry and the arts. Debates surrounding issues such as climate change, migration, sexual abuse, racism, and discrimination based on sex and gender are taking place at the heart of society, with ordinary citizens actively participating through social media. In other words, citizens have become a political factor – the voice of the individual is being heard.

Recent Dutch novels that have been acquired by publishing houses from many different countries.

In Friesland, the most northwestern province of the Netherlands, everyone speaks Dutch, but a large portion of the population also speaks Holland’s second official language: Frisian. For writers and poets using Frisian, the potential reader- ship is limited, as no more than approxi- mately half a million people consider it their mother tongue. But the sensuality and powerful imagery of the language, as well as its unique idioms and humour, have an appeal that refuses to tailor itself to practical considerations. For many poets, Frisian is simply the best language to express what they want to say.

Hardly anyone could have failed to notice this book in recent months. An anthology in Arabic for child refugees. A lot of people smile when they see the book. Because it opens the other way around. And I think letters are funny too when you can’t read them. Jip and Janneke and Frog in Arabic, read from left to right. Jubelientje. Alfie the Werewolf.

But behind this book is a deadly serious story.

Over the past two decades, crime literature in the Low Countries has come of age. Established crime authors are attracting a large readership with their often down-to-earth, realistic crime stories. Renowned literary authors are no longer averse to suspense and are delivering exciting novels that are both successful and popular. Talented new writers are announcing themselves with idiosyncratic, well-written thrillers.

Dutch non-fiction tends not to be about the Netherlands. Many non-fiction authors write on subjects that are played out far from our borders, or else the books are so universal in character that it is difficult to define them as typically Dutch. Where this strongly international orientation comes from is a moot point: is it from the tradition of being a trading power, thereby always open to international influences, or is it from a lack of any strongly national mind-set?

The Vondel Translation prize for the best English translation of a Dutch book published during 2007 and 2008 goes to Sam Garrett for his translation of Ararat, written by Frank Westerman (Harvill Secker 2008).

Histories of Dutch literature identify the novel Character as a work of the New Objectivity, a movement from the first half of the twentieth century that came as a reaction to the lyrical and symbolist prose that preceded it. Reading the book again after so many years, I am struck mainly by the emotional, dramatic undertone, which is amplified by a style you could call notarial, as if the book has been written with a cold etching needle. This contrast between legalistic prose and dramatic themes has an extraordinary effect; perhaps best described as “cold fire”.

History as it is recorded on the collective memory bears little resemblance to what actual people lived through. Without realising, people eventually come to be fashion their memories on what is said in the present. Then, one day, a novelist (a genuine novelist) rediscovers the concrete reality of a historical period we believed we knew, and everything seems different. There is always something shocking about such discrepancies. This is why the great novels which take place during the last European war (and the days which followed) were, initially, poorly received. I am thinking of Malaparte’s La pelle [1]. Or indeed Tworki by Marek Bienczyk, about which I wrote in these pages (DeNoël, 2006). And now The Darkroom of Damocles [2], by Willem Frederik Hermans.

A writer’s success can, to a certain degree, be determined by his sales figures. By this token, Saskia Noort stands head and shoulders above the rest. Of her three books that have been published so far, more than 750,000 have been sold, which means that there is a Saskia Noort book in almost one in every ten houses in The Netherlands. It is the tip of the iceberg. Behind her, authors are lined up: old hands, beginners, young women, middle-aged men. Together they produce about fifty thrillers a year, all with one thing in common: they are sparsely translated and therefore unknown abroad, unknown and therefore unpopular.

They were on either side of forty, the poets who passed for the ‘young guard’ of Dutch poetry in the mid-eighties. Huub Beurskens, Willem Jan Otten, Robert Anker, Anneke Brassinga, Stefan Hertmans, Luuk Gruwez, Charles Ducal. For many years they had been regarded as the newest generation of gifted poets. But in the late nineties things began to change, and today’s ‘young poets’ are no longer in their forties, but in their twenties and thirties. In another development, the mid-nineties saw a revival of interest in poetry performances in Holland and Flanders. Poems were no longer read in seclusion, which had previously been seen as the only way to enjoy poetry.

Considering there are many highly literary works of non-fiction from Flanders and the Netherlands, Ger Groot asks how justifiably the position is that literature means ‘fiction’. A look at a number of highlights.

‘If you’re lucky, you sometimes come across an intellectual who knows where The Netherlands are when you’re abroad,’ wrote Gerrit Komrij in the late eighties of the previous century. ‘Roughly, at least. Somewhere near Denmark. It’s incredibly difficult to explain to such a person that The Netherlands have their own language, for instance.

The children’s book landscape of the Low Countries is particularly rich in variety. It resembles a patchwork quilt of tiny meadows and broad pastures, of busy sprawling cities and peaceful sleepy villages, of hilly regions and vast plains, of weed-covered ditches and turbulent streams. Upon closer examination the literary geographer will also notice a demographic distinction: a single language region with two dialects, two cultures, two historical backgrounds.

Dutch is a language spoken not only by some twenty-five million people living in the Netherlands and Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) but also in Surinam and on the islands of Curaçao, Bonaire and Aruba. Authors who write in Dutch can therefore communicate with readers in a variety of different countries. Books cross borders drawn by history, just as history has left its mark on literature. Colonisation and decolonisation have profoundly influenced many of the novels that appeared since Multatuli’s landmark Max Havelaar (1860). The Northern Netherlands broke away from Spain during the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648) while Spain retained control of the south. The Southern Netherlands had a decisive impact on the respective cultures of modern Holland and Belgium. Protestantism determined the culture of the north to a large extent, Catholicism that of the south.

When it comes to thematic art exhibitions, consistency of content is more important than the quality of the pictures and objects displayed. The same applies to a national literature when it is taken as the theme of a festival, a series of readings, or the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Why should I be interested in Dutch literature just because it happens to come from Belgium or the Netherlands? A writer wants to find his own answers, which has nothing to do with arrogance but everything with discipline and technique. He doesn’t represent a country, let alone a government, but rather his own particular qualities.

In the essay ‘A Walk on the Wild Square’ Paul Demets strolls around in the poetic landscape of the 1980s and 1990s. Demets is a poetry critic for the Flemish daily De Morgen. He contributes regularly to literary journals (Awater en Ons Erfdeel) and writes poetry (De papegaaienziekte, Meulenhoff, 1999 and De bloedplek, De Bezige Bij, 2012.