The VSB Poetry Prize 2016 has been awarded to poet, writer, columnist and Classics scholar Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. The prize jury selected Pfeijffer’s Idyllen (Idylls), which earlier received the Jan Campert Prize, as the best Dutch-language poetry collection of the previous year. ‘This book sings, creaks, fabulates, dreams and is bursting with an almost unstoppable poetical dream’, the jury states.

Pfeijffer received the prize, consisting of 25,000 euros and a glass sculpture by Maria Roosen, from chairman of the jury, Kees ’t Hart, at the award ceremony held on Wednesday, 27 January – the eve of Dutch Poetry Week – in the Academiegebouw of the University of Groningen. Poets Pieter Boskma, Geert van Istendael, Toon Tellegen and Maud Vanhauwaert were also nominated for the prize.

The 2016 shortlist for the VSB Poetry Prize, for the best Dutch-language collection of the previous year, includes two Belgian poets and three from The Netherlands. Out of 114 submitted collections, the most recent work by Pieter Boskma, Geert van Istendael, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Toon Tellegen and Maud Vanhauwaert have been especially commended by the prize jury, and one will be selected as the winner on 27 January 2016, 19:30, at an award ceremony held at the University of Groningen’s Academiegebouw Aula. The winner receives 25,000 euros and a glass sculpture by Maria Roosen.