Ester Naomi Perquin: Dutch poet, Ester Naomi Perquin (Utrecht 1980), worked for several years as a custodian at a prison to pay for her studies at the Amsterdam Creative Writing School. Her books include, Napkins at Half-Mast, On Behalf of the Other and Cell Inspections.
David Colmer: David Colmer is an Australian translator of Dutch literature based in Amsterdam. He has won many translation prizes, including the Impac prize for his 2010 translation of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin and the Independent Foreign Fiction award for his 2012 rendering of Bakker’s The Detour.
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.