(Amsterdam, 1936) is a writer, poet, essay writer and art critic. He has a wide-ranging oeuvre of more than thirty works to his name, of which Waar was je nou (Where were you) was the most successful. This novel, in which Schippers calls into being the Amsterdam and Zandvoort of his youth, was awarded the 2006 Libris literature prize. The novel is characteristic for his work, in which language experiments play an important part. K. Schippers (pen name of Gerard Stigter) was one of the founders of the avant-gardist literary magazine Barbarber, in which he once published a menu. He looks at language the way he looks at art. One of his great heroes is Marcel Duchamp. He followed in the footsteps of the artist who some 100 years ago introduced an autographed lavatory bowl as art. That journey resulted in 2010 in the boek De bruid van Marcel Duchamp (Marcel Duchamp’s bride). Schippers held the 4 May commemoration speech in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, entitled De komst van de jazz (The advent of jazz). In 1996 Schippers received the PC Hooftprijs for his entire oeuvre.

(Amsterdam, 1943) his career as a writer and journalist is determined by two big passions: pop music and America. In the late 1960s Donkers belonged to the top of Dutch pop journalism. He was a critic for the Volkskrant and worked for Hitweek. In those days he started making programmes for VPRO radio. First mainly pop programmes but later he worked on the foreign desk as well. He left for America early 1970s to report the elections for VPRO and various magazines and newspapers. Those stories were later collected in Amerika, Amerika. In 1974 he and others formed the first editorial staff of the literary magazine Revisor. The next decade he wrote first and foremost travelogues from Africa, Asia and Latin America. In 2006 Mijn muziek (My music) appeared, an overview of his work as a pop journalist including a cd with recordings of his own.

(1977, New York) made her debut in 2010 with The Possessed, a book about her favourite Russian writers, including Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. In pursuit of literary truth, Batuman repeats Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus, and travels to Tolstoy’s ancestral estate to investigate whether the great man might in fact have been murdered. The search leads to digressions on a wide range of subjects, from literary mores and translations to questions of love, songs by The Smiths, and the making of the film King Kong. By following the footsteps of her literary heroes, Batuman succeeds in bringing them to life and giving them a place in today’s world. Batuman,born in New York of Turkish parents, received a doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University. She frequently writes for the New Yorker. Her essays are striking because of their fresh, comical, yet solid style. Her first book appeared in Dutch translation in 2010. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award (2007) and a Whiting Writers’ Award (2010).