Flanders Literature helps publishers and festival organisers find that one particular title or author that is the perfect fit for their list or audience. So take a good look around, we present a selection of the finest literature from Flanders. If you like what you see, please get in touch with us for further information.
A talented writer, original and funny, who is definitely one to watch
Le Monde
While working on his thesis, David Van Reybrouck came across the accusation that the Belgian writer and Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck had plagiarised from the work of the South African author Eugène Marais. ‘The Plague’ sweeps the reader along in a thrilling literary adventure, which leaves its image on the mind’s eye long after the last page has been turned.
Lighthouse keeper Tijs spends all day looking out at the sea. He’s waiting for his friend Sailor, who has promised to return so they can travel the world together. It’s all Tijs can think about.
‘Waiting for Sailor’ is a book that will long stay with you and where you can turn to whenever you find yourself missing someone.
All the problems of post-colonial Africa seem to rage there in exaggerated form. Ten years after her highly praised 'Back to the Congo', Lieve Joris was brave enough to return during a particularly precarious moment in Congolese history.
A world that sizzles with activity and teems with life
De Standaard
In 'In the Shadow of the Ark' Anne Provoost takes her inspiration from the Biblical account of the Flood. Re Jana and her family leave the rising water levels of the marshes for the desert where it is rumoured that the largest vessel of all time is being built. The writer enthrals with a chronicle of quickly changing events in what is nevertheless a calmly developing story, with vivid scenes that appeal strongly to the imagination.
The evocative power of language, together with Pleysier’s masterful arrangement of words and sentences, combine to make this a literary jewel.
De Telegraaf
Pleysier is a master at giving voice to that great and painful silence of the generations. He does this without using any great emphasis, so that the reader feels he is a guest in the house, and, like the narrator, looks forward to being invited to Berchem again next year.
A sparkling novel with a thunderous effect, a Flemish song of truth and semblance
Vrij Nederland
Mortier writes with great powers of suggestion. So many things in this book, although remaining hidden, are made as clear as day.
‘My Fellow Skin’ is ultimately about loss. Anton loses not only his love, but also his youth, the protection of his parents and the old house in the village, and is left desolate.
Van Bastelaere provokes, menaces and seduces, curses and sings, but ceaselessly knows to fascinate his reader, to tangle him in his web of words
Ons Erfdeel
‘Affairs of the Heart’ is generally acknowledged as Van Bastelaere's best and richest work to date. In this collection, the heart appears as an empty signifier which is accorded another meaning in every poem and is shown as a cultural construction.
Gilliams’ sixty-eight poems and his entire body of work are part of the painful and obsessive effort to uncover and preserve his true self. The ultimate goal of his endeavors was to create a “lyrical autobiography”, a still portrait in the sea of life.
Moeyaert proves without doubt that even a happy childhood can be a goldmine for a writer.
De Volkskrant
Bart Moeyaert is the youngest of seven brothers. His early years in his native city of Bruges were particularly happy and furnished him with an abundance of material for this much-praised autobiographical collection. In the forty-nine stories, humour, warmth and a sense of solidarity are prominent, but between the lines lies a far richer spectrum of emotions.
A display of fireworks so sensual you can taste them.
Gouden Uil jury
Perfect order always degenerates into chaos, and revolutions into hell. Peter Verhelst describes a city falling apart and descending into violence. ‘Tonguecat’ is a real literary tour de force, a visionary story about today’s urban society and about revolutions.
A rabbit family that you instantly adopt as your own
De Leeswelp
Ricky Rabbit is different from the other rabbits: his right ear droops, while his left ear stands straight up. Whatever he does, the other rabbits make fun of him. In the end, his humour earns him a place in the group as the entertainer.
When Joseph Pearce was fourteen his father told him he was not an Englishman but from Germany and of Jewish origin. Twenty-five years later, Pearce decided to seek out his Jewish relatives. With the story of his own odyssey, which takes him to blood relatives on four continents, Pearce makes the tragedy of the twentieth century painfully palpable.
I am well past fifteen years old, but I am glad that this book has come my way.
Het Parool
Through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl, we witness the life of a broken family over the course of three stories. In the first of the three we plunge straight into a fierce family quarrel. All survive intact. But the tone has been set. Bart Moeyaert deals with love in a sensitive and refreshing way, expertly unravelling its complexities while at the same time leaving its mystery intact.
More than a tribute to a loved one and a poet: a sincere work by a sensitive and powerful writer
NRC Handelsblad
The author uses De Coninck’s poems as the vehicle to tell his story; with them she is able to describe the biographical background and the intimacy of their shared life, while retaining the balance she seeks. Within this poetic space she makes clear what Herman de Coninck was – and is – to her.
Van hee holds on to the ordinary, familiar, everyday things: landscapes, conversations, relationships and moments of intense love. The seeming transparency of her language gives a universal dimension to our everyday images of loss. The reader imagines himself safe in her world, an illusion that is often suddenly dashed.
His poems seem so easy and so obvious, but their core is the sense of being alone in a silent world
Hugo Brems
A constant in Herman de Coninck's poems is the urge to bring poetry closer to everyday reality without adopting the pose of a distant observer. In his poems, he often takes a familiar situation as the point of departure, things like an autumn walk or a birthday party. He is a poet of understatement, who counters sentimentality with ironic humour.
Claes’ ingenuity conceals the fact that he has cast his tale in the form of a thriller - a convincing and exciting thriller
De Volkskrant
‘The Phoenix’ is a historical detective story in the tradition of Umberto Eco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’. It takes place in Florence in 1494, and the leading character is one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance, Count Pico della Mirandola, known as the Phoenix.
The great charm of this book lies in its explosive mix of opinion and storytelling.
El Pais
The result is a beautiful balance between intellectual understanding and personal impressions. His great strength is his ability to keep his eyes open in all circumstances and to surprise himself with the realization that ‘travelling often turns out to be a process of finding what you weren’t looking for’.
Hard, pleasantly crude and more topical than ever. His stories are on fast forward without the brakes on.
De Standaard over 'Web'
Mennes depicts young characters who resort to extreme measures in an attempt to deal with the emptiness of their lives. ‘Toast’ offers a heart-wrenching and impressive portrait of a Lost Generation.
‘The Rose and the Swine’ was inspired by ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and is a tribute to the primal force of the fairy tale. Provoost, a celebrated author for all ages, offers her readers works of the highest literary quality.
Three Sisters in London will one day form the exquisite prologue to the inevitable Collected Works of Eric de Kuyper.
De Stem
During World War I, Eric de Kuyper’s grandfather’s position with the railways took him and his family to London. The family’s three daughters, who were then in their adolescence, never returned to London. They gave this gleaming period of their lives a special place in the stories they often told on family occasions. De Kuyper, who was born during World War II, has collected these stories in a captivating book.
An accurate, well-researched depiction of the extreme political tensions in the Middle East in the twentieth century. Against this historical backdrop, Mendes steers his story to a spectacular climax.
She has expanded the boundaries of travel writing.
Times Literary Supplement
In Mali Blues Lieve Joris travels from Senegal via Mauretania to Mali. She gives a portrait of the people she encounters. In their will to survive they have learned to adapt to constants such as poverty and rebellion.
Stylistically sharp from beginning to end, a tour de force throughout
De Groene Amsterdammer
Eduard Bottelaer is a forty-year-old actor who doesn’t expect much from life any more. That is, until he meets the young artist Helena. When she sets off for New York, leaving Eduard behind, she gives him a special task. Eduard is hopelessly in love and becomes obsessed by the bizarre challenge, which lands him in the most unexpected situations.
'High Key' is a postmodern novel, a collection of text types: monologues, dances and stories. Hoste tries to create a new reality via the imagination and techniques of association. It can be read as an incantation or a magic spell.
There cannot be many writers as tough and sensitive as Bart Moeyaert.
NRC Handelsblad
A master of creating an oppressive atmosphere, Moeyaert succeeds in making his readers sense everything. There’s no air, there’s no escape, just an inevitable chain of events. In haunting and poetic prose, Bart Moeyaert displays his razor-sharp observation of the human psyche and the dangers of prejudice.
In ‘To Blackbird Creek’, Stefan Hertmans narrates the coming of age of a boy in a Flemish village in the 1950s and 60s, in a grotesque, but just as often moving way. His budding sexuality and lively imagination so take possession of him that the world appears dark, terrifying and full of secrets.
'Falling' exhibits the traits of a classic tale of destiny.
Woutertje Pieterse Prize jury
Lucas is spending the summer with his mother in his grandfather’s house as he does every year. This year, however, everything is different: his grandfather died at Christmas and gradually tongues are beginning to wag about his war years. In a sober style and with atmospheric, detailed descriptions and convincing dialogue, Anne Provoost creates an extraordinarily oppressive feel to her novel.
More beautiful and more moving prose has not appeared this year. A gem.
Vrij Nederland
Thisbook is narrated by the author as a young boy, who listens to his mother read out letters from her absent sister-in-law, a Catholic nun doing missionary work in far-off China. The novelty is the narration of the story from a child’s perspective – a child who is so close to the ground that he tells people apart by their feet.
She is the only philosopher writing in Dutch who can make philosophy not just nonacademic and understandable but moving.
Herman De Coninck
The great value of Patricia De Martelaere's essays ultimately lies in what makes them rise above philosophical debate. Whereas philosophers like to make readers furrow their brows as deeply as possible, the author excels at laying out a clear line of argument, avoiding jargon and applying convincing logic.
Geert De Kockere’s poetic language and Lieve Baeten’s gorgeous illustrations lift this book above the average, as does its content: together with Elly Dark Blue, readers learn that there is more beyond a monochromatic world.
Love and what follows is the theme of this collection of ten stories: about the catastrophe ánd the tenderness of sex, about habit, love-hate, memory, selfpity, rollicking revenge.
‘The Charred Alphabet’ follows the life of the author from October 1990 to September 1991. This literary diary is a colourful mixture of stories, impressions of and reflections on literature, art, love, nature, politics and growing old.
An original and particularly funny novel full of amusing melancholy
NRC Handelsblad
Lanoye has managed to deal with the banal subject of a boy's unrequited love in a thoroughly unbanal way. This auto-biographical story retains its power because it is imbedded in the hilarious background of a childhood in Flanders around 1970. With his rich, melancholic style Lanoye has been able to create a modest monument for his first `touching' romance.
Complete hopelessness without slipping into pathos or protective irony
Ons Erfdeel
In this collection of stories Berckmans shows the most unsavoury and corrupt side of reality. The unstable characters bear their existential emptiness without illusions, self-deceiving optimism is alien to them. Every sentence of Berckmans is filled with the buzz of rock ‘n roll.
A moving book with a rich and functional recounting of anecdotes
Het Parool
‘White is Always Nice’ is a moving story about origins, mourning and language. It is the extended monologue of an old woman who has just died but cannot stop talking. In a one-sided conversation with her silent son, she keeps up her usual non-stop chatter as her body is laid out and preparations are made for the wake.
‘Aunt Jeannot’s Hat' is set in a suburb of the city shortly after the Second World War. The air is alive with the excitement of newfound freedom and life has taken its leave of traditional conventions. The magnificent and the mundane aspects of a young boy’s life are beautifully depicted in many small details.
Fresh and candid. De Kuypers’s amused style lifts everything up out of the everyday.
Vrij Nederland
At the end of the 1940s a family from Brussels resume a pre-war tradition of spending the summer in Ostend, on the Belgian coast. As he plays, the young boy Eric takes it all in: the sights, textures, tastes and smells – all the things his adult self will remember with delight and wonder.
Claus reveals his mastery by producing a sentimental story about a total failure
De Morgen
In ‘A Tender Destruction’ Claus uses a number of tried and trusted themes. However, he tells the tale of this tragic love affair masterfully, without ever becoming depressing.
Ingeniously constructed and imaginative tales arouse emotion and a sense of tragedy.
Het Parool
The four stories in this debut provide a caricatured but equally nostalgic and loving impression of ‘La Flandre Profonde’ and demonstrate Lanoye’s feel for humour and style. Although the main character from ‘A Butcher’s Son with Glasses’ resembles the author in many ways, these stories are nevertheless loaded with surrealism, wit and crackling irony.
Within the space of three days, six people are murdered. All the evidence leads to Angelo Ledda, a ruthless hitman who suffers from progressive memory loss. A well-researched crime novel by the 'Godfather of the Flemish thriller'.
‘The Man Who Found a Job’ is a milestone in Brusselmans' extensive oeuvre, serving as unique point of reference for one of Flanders’ most read authors. The combination of desperation and emptiness and the sardonic indulgence of this general malaise in the innocent, unsuspecting citizen caused a major stir in the traditional Flemish literature of the 1980s.
Central to ‘The Accursed Fathers’ is the life story of Pamela. Rejected by her mother who had been hoping for a boy, browbeaten by her father whom she refuses to hate, the heroine of the story is the eternal victim of a hereditary curse. Through her central character, Monika van Paemel exposes the subjugation of women
One of the landmark European novels of the post-war era
J.M. Coetzee
This Bildungsroman is also a social document about political and social misfortune in Flanders before, during, and after World War II. The novel has continued to be a bestseller for many years and has been translated into numerous languages.
Moving, interesting and a literary jewel in terms of its form
Vrij Nederland
‘Letter to Boudewijn’ is a lesson in social history, a meticulous description of village life, and an autobiography all in one. It is a book in which the author confronts himself with his origins, with the shift from material to spiritual poverty, and with sorrow at the loss of solid ground in a group of people who stick together.
In ‘Writing Prague’ Daniël Robberechts tries to create a written portrait of this turbulent city during the end of the 1960s and the decade that followed it. As it goes on, the web becomes increasingly tangled, and ‘Writing Prague’ turns into a book about writing a book, begging the question: is ‘writing’ Prague even possible anymore?
Each poem attests to a supreme form of living – even in failure
Tom Van Inschoot
Acutely aware of the destructive power of time, Bontridder does not set an ethical or aesthetic example to his audience. Rather, he holds a broken mirror up to them, creating a reflection in which the poet and reader rebel against their powerlessness.
Great because of its simplicity and its instantly gripping truthfulness
Gazet van Antwerpen
A monumental book and true Flemish classic. It is a spectacular expression of Boon’s compassion for the committed individual who, despite all adversity, wants to keep on believing in socialist ideals.
With frightening precision, 'The Year of Cancer' sums up just how ugly love can be
De Morgen
Pierre, a suave young man from the insurance and banking world falls for Toni, a simple and somewhat unstable beautician working in show business. The couple gradually drift apart, until the inevitable break-up follows. Pierre continues to read Toni’s horoscope, Cancer. A couple of years later, he is called to her sickbed.
'Arriving In Avignon’ is its own strange and gorgeously sprightly thing. Here’s hoping that as many readers as possible will discover it.
Rain Taxi Review of Books
What at first resembles a cross between a memoir and a guidebook in time proves to be the story of a young man's dogged yet futile quest to know his own mind – unless it is the ancient city of Avignon itself that is our real protagonist: a mystery that can be approached, but never wholly solved. The narrative unfolds in a stream of consciousness, drawing the reader into the protagonist’s quest for experience.
