Anaïs Van Ertvelde

(Belgium, 1988) teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. She has published columns and opinion pieces in De Morgen, De Standaard, Knack, NRC and de Volkskrant. In 2017, she made her debut with Vuile lakens. Een hedendaagse visie op seksualiteit (Dirty Sheets. A contemporary vision of sexuality). In Zorgangst (Care Fear, 2022), Anaïs tells six stories about old age, disability and bdsm in which she explores our fears - justified or not - of care, dependence and helplessness. After years of researching gender and sexuality, she shifted her focus to disability. For Handicap: een bevrijding (Handicap: a liberation), she receives the J. Greshoff Prize 2024, The Hague's biennial prize for an essay or collection of essays. The jury: ‘It is a book that makes us look at disability differently. Van Ertvelde introduces crip theory to our language area and she revises the language we inherited to talk about bodies. And with that language, she changes our thinking.'