Charlotte Van den Broeck was born in Turnhout, Belgium, in 1991. After studies in English and German, she took a Masters in Drama at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp. She has published two collections of poetry, Kameleon (2015), which was awarded the Herman De Coninck debut prize for poetry by a Flemish author, and Nachtroer (2017), which was nominated for VSB Poetry Prize 2018 and the Ida Gerhard Prize. These two volumes are combined in Chameleon / Nachtroer, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (Bloodaxe Books, 2020). Her poetry has also been translated into German, Spanish, French, Serbian and Arabic. In 2016 she opened the Frankfurt Bookfair together with Dutch poet Arnon Grunberg. In 2017 she was one of that year’s Versopolis poets, performing at several European festivals including Ledbury in Britain. As well as publishing critically acclaimed collections she is renowned for her distinctive performances, which are differ from UK/US versions of spoken word as theatre pieces ‘searching for the speakability and experience of oral poetry’, now presented in English as well as Dutch.
David Colmer was born in Adelaide in 1960. Since moving to Amsterdam in the early 1990s, he has published a wide range of translations of Dutch literature. He is also a published author of fiction. Colmer has won many awards for his translations, most notably the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker. In 2009 he was awarded the biennial NSW Premier’s Translation Prize for his body of work.
