Marga Minco (b. 1920) has been awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize 2019, one of the most prestigious Dutch literary awards, for her prose. The jury praised her as the author of a modest and intensely powerful body of work. ‘Without psychologizing, without resorting to pathos or pretention, she enables us to understand and fully engage with an inconceivable reality.’

This autumn the Les Phares du Nord campaign is taking twenty-one Dutch and Flemish authors to five French cities. A great deal of attention is also being paid to Dutch-language children’s and young adult literature, a much sought-after export product. From 28 November to 3 December, the Netherlands and Flanders are the ‘focus country’ at the Salon du Livre et de la Presse Jeunesse in Montreuil, France’s biggest and most important children’s book fair.

Cees Nooteboom has been awarded the Horst Bienek Prize for his entire poetic oeuvre, the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste announced Tuesday afternoon. The Akademie praises 85-year-old Nooteboom as one of the most renowned European writers.

Pieter Waterdrinker has won the Tzum prize for the best sentence from a book published in 2017. Waterdrinker wins a trophy and 95 euros, as many euros as words in the sentence, for a sentence published in his novel Tsjaikovskistraat 40. The English translation rights were sold to Scribe this summer. The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street: a century of revolution in St Petersburg will be published in 2020 in England, Australia and New Zealand.

Flemish author Jeroen Olyslaegers will be living and working as a writer-in-residence in Amsterdam from 2 October to 30 November, upon invitation by the Dutch Foundation for Literature. During his residency in Amsterdam, Jeroen Olyslaegers will work on a new historical novel and give a series of public lectures and interviews.

This month a bilingual collection of Frisian literature in Frisian and English, almost 400 pages in length, will be published by UK-based Francis Boutle Publishers. It is the first anthology in the world to present a comprehensive range of Frisian prose and poetry past and present in translation. Swallows and Floating Horses will be launched in Boekhandel Van der Velde in Leeuwarden on Thursday 4 October.

The jury of the European Literature Prize 2018 has announced that the award goes to Norwegian author Johan Harstad and his translators Edith Koenders and Paula Stevens, for the novel Max, Mischa & het Tet-offensief (Podium). The prize will be presented to the author and his translators on the evening of Wednesday 31 October at the Crossing Border Festival in The Hague.

Joost Swarte was awarded de Prix spécial du jury at the BD comic festival in Sollies-Ville, France, for his New York Book. The book provides a complete overview of his illustrations for The New Yorker, over 450 sketches, illustrations, ‘spots’ and covers, together with hitherto unpublished sketches, with commentary by the artist himself.

Simone Atangana Bekono was awarded the Poetry Debut Prize Aan Zee for her collection How the First Sparks Became Visible, translated from Dutch by David Colmer (2017). The prize is intended to stimulate young talent in poetry. Atangana Bekono was praised for the anger that resounds in her poetry and her unique voice.

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel De avond is ongemak (The Discomfort of the Evening) was a huge success in the Netherlands, going straight into the bestseller lists, even before the booksellers’ panel of television’s De Wereld Draait Door made it its book of the month. More than 40,000 copies were sold within a few months in the Netherlands, and, internationally, rights were rapidly sold to Suhrkamp in Germany and Faber & Faber in Britain and America. In Italy the book will be published by Nutrimenti, and a Korean translation is in preparation for Gimm-Young Publishers.

From 4 to 7 July the literary festival Bookstan - No East, No West took place in Sarajevo for the third time, with as this year’s theme Borders and Boundaries. There was an important place for literature in Dutch at this year’s festival. Curator Geert Mak, with the support of Mireille Berman of the Dutch Foundation for Literature, invited Dutch and Flemish writers to discuss borders in culture, literature and politics.

The shortlist for the European Literature Prize 2018 has been presented in Spui25 in Amsterdam. Five titles have been selected by a professional jury led by Anna Enquist as the best Dutch translations of contemporary European novels published last year. A special feature of the prize is that it is awarded to both authors and translators.

Dutch author Cees Nooteboom has won the Premio Internazionale Elena Violani – Landi, the international literary prize from the poetry centre of the University of Bologna. The prize was awarded to Nooteboom at the opening ceremony of the Oven Poetry Festival in Bologna in Italy on Wednesday 6 June. The prize money awarded with the prize is € 6.000

The BookSpot Gouden Strop (Golden Noose) 2018 has been awarded to Willem Asman for his book Enter (Ambo | Anthos) by jury chairman Anniko van Santen. The Shadow Prize went to Eva Keuris for her debut Over het spoor. Willem Asman wrote Enter with a scholarship from the Dutch Foundation for Literature. Thanks to the new sponsor BookSpot, the Gouden Strop is worth an amount of € 20,000 this year.

Flemish poet Miriam Van hee has won the Ultima 2017 Prize for literature for her poetic oeuvre. Her latest collection, ‘As If We Were Summoned Somewhere’ (Als werden wij ergens ontboden), was described by the Ultimas’ jury as “an undeniable crowning achievement in this author’s unique, somewhat hushed oeuvre”. The jury went on to say that it is “a collection that deserves recognition, attention, and many readers.” Van hee received this Flemish Culture Award - a bronze statue and a sum of 10.000 euro - on 27 February 2018.

The prestigious, triennial Theo Thijssen Prize for children’s and youth literature goes to Bibi Dumon Tak, the board of the P.C. Hooft Prize for Literature announced. She is the first author of literary non-fiction to be awarded this prize. She regularly received scholarships from the Dutch Foundation for Literature for writing her books. Her work has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, German, English, Japanese and Polish.

A special edition edited by David Colmer has been published in print by The Enchanting Verses Literary Review.

For the Dutch and Flemish presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2016, the Dutch Foundation for Literature participated in the making of a series of 25 video portraits of Dutch and Flemish writers. The portraits are now available on a dedicated website.

The Woutertje Pieterse Prize 2018, one of the most prestigious prizes for Dutch children’s and youth literature - worth 15.000 euro, has been awarded to Annet Schaap for her debut Lampje (‘Little Lamp’). The jury praised the beautiful use of language in the book and the sense of recognition it evokes.

All in 2017 awarded Translation Grants (and other grants) can be found in the annual report of the Dutch Foundation for Literature. An overview of translations of Dutch and Frisian literature worldwide, both published and in preparation, both subsidized by our Foundation and not, may be found in our Translations Database.

Dutch and Flemish literature are in the spotlight at this year’s Leipziger Buchmesse, the second largest book fair in Germany, and its simultaneous literary festival Leipzig Liest. From Thursday 15 until Sunday 18 March graphic novelists and illustrators are live at work in Atelier Parade, more than ten Dutch and Flemish authors will read from their work or be interviewed on stage, and last but not least, new digital literature is introduced to publishers and the general public.

Once every four years the Dutch Foundation for Literature asks an independent agency to find out what ‘users of the Foundation’, particularly publishers, other literary organisations, writers and translators, think of the policies, communication and service of the Dutch Foundation.

Over 100 Dutch and Flemish authors will present themselves at more than twenty literary festivals throughout France. All this in the context of Les Phares du Nord (The Lighthouses of the North), an intensive campaign aimed at presenting Dutch literature in France, the second largest book market of Europe and the fifth worldwide.

Eighteen Dutch and Flemish writers are nominated for the Libris Literature Prize 2018: one of the most prestigious literary awards in the Netherlands, modeled after the Man Booker Prize, and worth 50,000 euro. Last years laureate Alfred Birney sold more than 85.000 copies of his magnum epos ‘De tolk van Java’, an English translation is in preparation.

‘What I would most like to do is write lines that seem as if they have always existed,’ so wrote Menno Wigman (1966-2018) in a recent letter to the Volkskrant literary critic Arjan Peters. Wigman produced a body of work that can rightly be called classic, not just because of the style, but also because he is one of the few contemporary poets who wrote sentences that are known and can be quoted by many readers.

The BNG Bank Literature Prize, the annual Dutch prize for young writers − worth 15.000 euros, has been awarded to poet, novelist, and playwright Marjolijn van Heemstra for En we noemen hem… (And His Name Is..). German, English, French, Italian and Spanish translations of this novel are in preparation.