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Anneke Brassinga (c) privat
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Anneke Brassinga, born in 1948, is a translator, prose author, essayist and poet and is reckoned to be the language magician of Dutch literature. Her Collected Poems, entitled Passwords, has been described as a “reservation for endangered language species”, in which Brassinga leads the readers to various places and lets them taste the often unique words associated with them. Nonetheless, Brassinga’s language games are not games for the sake of playing, but are for her the route to ecstasy – the poet has a creative power and Brassinga draws on it.
Her debut book was Aurora in 1987, and since then she has published ten more collections of verse as well as books of essays and various oublications in magazines and journals, letters and dairy entries. Brassinga has received various prizes in the Netherlands for her extensive range of work. Her book of poems Landgoed was awarded the Herman Gorter Prize (1990) and Verschiet earned her the VSB Poesiepreis (2002). Her life’s work was honoured in 2008 with the Constantijn Huygenspreis and this year with the P.C. Hooftpreis, the Nobel Prize of the Netherlands. Last year she was a guest of the Berlin Artists’ Programme of the DAAD.