How do you deal with the loss of your best friend to cancer? There is no ready -made answer, but youth book writer Maren Stoffels from Drouwen found a special way to give her grief a place: she wrote a book about it.
In Another 27 days Stoffels tells the moving story of her girlfriend’s last weeks. Writing not only helped her in the grieving process, it also gave her recognition. Stoffels recently won with the book The National Prize Best Book for Young people 2025, an initiative of Bookkoepel CPNB.
Another 27 days arose during a difficult period in the life of Stoffels. She lost her best friend to cancer in 2019 and decided to depict the last part of her life as a novel.
“She was told that she still had 27 days to live. I went through her eyes to see how that should have been,” says Stoffels. “Writing was a grieving process for me. Very intense, but also very beautiful.”
To make the heavy theme bearable for young people, Stoffels came up with a second storyline. “My protagonist meets a girl with whom she experiences an adventure through a barter. This way the story remains light and exciting enough for people in thirteen.”
Stoffels has already written 42 books in the last twenty years, especially for children and young people from group four to the end of high school. Her work is also read by young adults and adults.
She also gives weekly lectures in schools and in libraries throughout the country. “I see thousands of children every year. They often know my books, not me as a person. That is also nice and quiet,” she laughs.
Although Stoffels is now a prize -winning author, she still has plenty of ambitions. That’s how she made with her recent book The midnight runner Her debut in the Fantasy genre.
But in the end it is mainly about what her work releases among readers. “Some young people tell me that my book finally dared to talk about someone they lost, or that they dared to take a step they didn’t dare before. Those kinds of stories are actually even more valuable than a prize.”