Gerrit Komrij - biography, career, poetry
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Gerrit Komrij |
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Gerrit Komrij (Winterswijk, March 30, 1944) is a Dutch poet, novelist, translator, critic, polemic journalist and playwright. From 2000 to 2004 he was the Dutch Dichter des Vaderlands or Poet Laureate.
Life
Komrij was born in a chicken run in the eastern Dutch town of Winterswijk where his parents had sought for shelter against German air raids. In 1968 his first volume of poetry was published, Maagdenburgse halve bollen en andere gedichten. In the seventies he grew to be a critic of television, literature and architecture, well-feared for his colourful and sarcastic sense of language.
Prose
In the meantime the critic and poet also wrote several autobiographical works, for instance Verwoest Arcadië (’Arcadia Demolished’, 1980) and Demonen (’Demons’, 2003). He also authored several novels, Over de bergen (’Over the Mountains’), Dubbelster (’Double Star’) and De klopgeest (’Poltergeist’).
Books about books, anthologies
Komrij is a collector of rare and absurd books, and wrote articles about these. Old homosexual literature, quaint 18th and 19th century poets and ancient literature about farting are some of his more remarkable subjects. Many of his book articles were put together in ’collections like Verzonken boeken (’Sunk Books’), Averechts (’The Other Way’} and Kakafonie (’Cacaphonia’). In 1979 Komrij published a new standard Dutch poetry anthology, De Nederlandse poëzie van de negentiende en twintigste eeuw in duizend en enige gedichten (Dutch poetry of the 19th and 20th century in 1001 poems’), soon followed by a volume of 17th and 18th century poetry and an anthology of mediaeval poems. He also edited various other anthologies, one about Mothers and one selecting poetry by Jacob Israël de Haan.
Gerrit Komrij translated all Shakespeare’s plays, and he wrote several hermetic dramas himself, that met with a lot of success. He emigrated in 1984 to Portugal, but often travels to the Netherlands, where his readers are living. His throaty voice and distinctive appearance are well known to the Dutch television public.
Awards
In 1993 for his prose Komrij received the P.C. Hooft Award, the chief literary accolade in the Dutch language area. Apart from this, he received several other prestigious awards.
About the author:
http://wikipedia.org
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