Els Moors

(Belgium, 1976) in 2007 won the Herman de Coninck prize for best poetic debut. The jury called it a ‘dreamed debut’, especially because of the ease with which Moors ‘captures the reader with a strange kind of triviality’, from a gardener in a purple ski suit to rabbits making love. Again and again Moors manages to overturn everyday scenes, e.g. in the last poem in the anthology: ‘Then I came home/I got rid of my heavy bag/in the corridor/you stood there waiting/those were steps/I placed beside you on the floor/one by one/someone bombed a station. Her debut as a novelist, Het verlangen naar een eiland (Longing for an Island), was reviewed in Trouw as a ‘road novel, there's no stopping it’. It is a witty tale of love, sex, grief as well as longing for the other. Moors studied Germanic languages in Ghent and subsequently did the creative writing course at the Rietveldacademie in Amsterdam.