The International Booker Prize for the
year 2020 has been announced. The coveted award was won by Marieke Lucas
Rijneveld for The Discomfort of Evening. It has been
translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison. The book centres around a
10-year-old girl Jas who is infuriated with her brother Matthies for not being
permitted to go for ice-skating with him. This occurs at the onset of the
novel. Her wish turns true and he dies. The debut novel then is a fascinating
case study of grief
About The Discomfort of Evening
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Translated by Michele Hutchison from Dutch
Published by Faber & Faber
Jas lives with her devout farming
family in the rural Netherlands. One winter’s day, her older brother joins an
ice skating trip. Resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to
God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex
of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a
darkness that threatens to derail them all. A bestselling sensation in the
Netherlands by a prize-winning young poet, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut
novel lays everything bare. It is a world of language unlike any other, which
Michele Hutchison’s striking translation captures in all its wild, violent
beauty.
About the
Author
Marieke
Lucas Rijneveld was born in
Nieuwendijk, Netherlands, in April 1991 and uses ‘they’ pronouns. They grew up
in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. One of
the greatest new voices in Dutch literature, their first poetry collection, Caulf’s Caul, was awarded the C. Buddingh’
Prize for best poetry debut in 2015, with the newspaper de Volkskrant naming
them literary talent of the year. In 2018, Atlas Contact published their first
novel, The Discomfort of Evening,
which won the prestigious ANV Debut Prize and was a national bestseller.
Alongside their writing career, Rijneveld works on a dairy farm. They live in
the Netherlands.
