Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival The Hague welcomed you to the Nieuw Waldeck Library for an appearance by writer Marja Pruis. She talked to Roos van Rijswijk about her new novel, Homework, and also read excerpts from it.

In the novel, Clara Feij has come to live in the most beautiful house in Amsterdam, according to herself. The cleaning is left to a slew of maids who have all fled their own countries. When Rose moves in, everything changes. How can you help someone you know nothing about? And how can you trust someone when all evidence seems against her?

Homework is a confrontational novel about intimate happiness and domestic betrayal. About being in charge and not wanting to be. With great precision, Marja Pruis exposes the confusion that traps Westerners with all their good intentions. 

Marja Pruis has been writing about the expectations men and women have of each other and of life since her debut novel Bloem (Flower). Her novel Atoomgeheimen (Nuclear Secrets is about intimacy and the loss of ideals. She has been called the chronicler of contemporary womanhood; she explores her themes further in her novels De vertrouweling (The Confidant) and Zachte riten (Soft Rites). Pruis works at De Groene Amsterdammer weekly as a literary editor and columnist, writing essays on topics as diverse as humour, shyness and greed.

She received the Jan Hanlo Prize for her collection of essays Kus me, straf me (Kiss Me, Punish Me) and the J. Greshoff Prize for essayism with Genoeg nu over mij (Enough about me now). For her columns, collected in Oplossingen (Solutions), she received the J. Heldring Prize. In Boos Meisje. Over vrouwen en frictie (Angry Girl. About Women and Friction), she writes about the split in which girls and women find themselves, including portraits of writers she admires such as Renate Rubinstein and Vivian Gornick. Her recently published novel Huiswerk (Homework) is about white privilege and the tension between employer and employee.

"Huiswerk is classic Pruis: bouncy, associative, multifaceted, imaginative, humorous, you regularly burst out laughing, but ultimately more serious than anticipated." (Tzum)

Festival tip: Pruis and many other writers and poets appeared at the grand festival evening Saturday Night Unlimited (20 January 2024), during which you chose your own route between twenty events on five stages at Theater aan het Spui and Filmhuis Den Haag.