Oeuvre Prize for Toon Tellegen
Poet and children’s books writer Toon Tellegen (b.1941) will receive the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his entire oeuvre. He made his debut at a fairly late age in 1980 as a poet of clear, playful, melancholy poetry. His poems were collected in Gedichten 1977 - 1999 (Poems 1977 - 1999). He subsequently published five more collections, of which Raafvogels (Ravens, 2006) is the most recent. The Constantijn Huygens Prize is worth €10,000.
In 1997 he received the most important children’s and youth literature prize, the Theo Thijssen Prize, for his post-1984 (animal) stories for children, which focus on love and friendship. Earlier this year Tellegen was awarded the Groningen Hendrik de Vries Prize.
F. Bordewijk Prize
The Jan Campert Society also announced the winners of the F. Bordewijk Prize and the Nienke van Hichtum Prize. The Bordewijk Prize goes to Dis by Marcel Möring (b.1957), ‘a breathtaking and hallucinating novel about a Jewish survivor set against a background of an infernal night at the TT motorcycle races in Assen, a city which - after reading Dis - you’ll never be able to visit without being biased again.’
Nienke van Hichtum Prize
The biannual Nienke van Hichtum Prize for children’s and youth literature has been awarded to children’s books writer Margriet Heymans for Diep in het bos van Nergena (Deep in the Woods of Nergena). ‘The combination of her subdued narrative style, implied emotions and beautiful illustrations(by herself) which show that which remains unspoken, make this book an ageless pearl of literature,’ according to the jury of the Jan Campert Society.
All prizes will be presented during the literary festival Het Voorwoord (The Preface) on 9 March 2008.
