Writer Anjet Daanje is for her novel The song of stork and dromedary awarded the Boekenbon Literatuurprijs 2022. The annual prize for novels and literary non-fiction, with a monetary value of 50,000 euros, was awarded on Thursday evening during a festive dinner in The Hague. It is the first major literary prize that 57-year-old Anjet Daanje receives. The novel, her tenth, was published last summer and has already received the highest praise in reviews.
Also read the review of The song of stork and dromedary: Only ‘The Discovery of Heaven’ comes close to this crushing book (●●●●●)
The jury spoke of “a literary tour de force”. The song of stork and dromedary is the equally compelling and demanding tenth novel by Daanje, which centers around the nineteenth-century writer Eliza May Drayden, who died young, a fictionalization of Emily Brontë. This Drayden haunts in eleven consecutive stories, each with the eloquence of a novella, through the lives of many characters, over three centuries. They often interpret an almost religious fascination for the dead writer – a mythologising mechanism that makes the novel itself seem captivated, because Daanje pushes the reader to high emotional peaks and makes them puzzle with Drayden’s enigmatic biography.
Also read this profile of Daanje: Who is writer Anjet Daanje? And should you actually be curious about the person behind a work of art?
The jury’s choice fell on “a book that reads like a train, but at the same time demands a lot from the reader,” said the jury, chaired by former Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt, in its report. “It’s bursting with elaborate intertextuality, overflowing with admirably ambitious changes of style and containing extraordinary reflections on authorship.”
bold works
The jury’s earlier choice for five ‘bold works’ already showed a preference for groundbreaking literary technique – for an imposing style and layered narratives. In addition to Daanje’s novel, these were also the dizzying science fiction novel The Mitsukoshi Comfort Baby Company by Auke Hulst, the style bomb True descriptions from the permafrost by Donald Niedekker, in which the ghost speaks of a poet who has frozen to death on Nova Zembla, the unpredictable and versatile collection of short stories Fathers who mourn by Carmien Michels and the literary-essayist self-examination book Do it yourself by Nina Weijers.
Anjet Daanje (1965), after her work had been more or less in the shadows for decades, broke through to the general public with her novel The remembered soldier (2019), which was awarded the F. Bordewijk Prize. The song of stork and dromedary is its successor. The Boekenbon Literatuurprijs is the first prize for which The song of stork and dromedary has been eligible; the jury assessed all fiction and non-fiction published between the summers of 2021 and 2022, a total of more than 565 books.
Due to the amount of the prize money, the Boekenbonprijs is one of the largest literature prizes in the Dutch language area – equaled by the Libris Literature Prize and the Boon Literatuurprijs, which was established this year. Last year the award went to On the way to De Hartz van Wessel in Gussinklo. It is now the first time in nine years that a female author has received this prize: Joke van Leeuwen received the prize in 2013, which was then still called the AKO Literature Prize.
Also read the review of The remembered soldier: This novel went unnoticed when it was published. Now our reviewer says: what a stunning book (●●●●●)