Poet, novelist and director Peter Verhelst (Brugge, 1962) is undeniably one of the most important authors in contemporary Dutch-language prose and poetry. This year, his latest poetry collection, Wij Totale Vlam (We total flame), received the Herman de Coninck Prize. This collection also was nominated for the VSB Poetry prize, because, according to the jury, it ‘blazes through recurring desire to momentary beauty, against the forgetting of tender things’. Previously, Verhelst received other prestigious awards for his work, such as De Gouden Uil, the Flemish Culture Prize, and the F. Bordewijk Prize (for his 1999 novel Tongkat). According to the poet, creation is equal to destruction; the motifs and images he sketches continuously repel or neutralize each other. Verhelst’s poems bathe in an apocalyptic atmosphere filled with allusions to literature, the visual arts, dance, theatre, music and classical mythology.

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