Lucas Rijneveld
NetherlandsAbout
Lucas Rijneveld, born in 1991 in the Dutch province of North Brabant, is a Dutch novelist and poet. They grew up in a strict Reformed Christian farming family, an upbringing that has influenced the rural settings, religious tensions and unsettling emotional landscapes of their fiction. Rijneveld studied at a teacher-training college and worked on a dairy farm while developing their literary career. Their first poetry collection, Calf’s Caul (Kalfsvlies), appeared in 2015 and won the C. Buddingh’ Prize for the best Dutch-language poetry debut. Their first novel, The Discomfort of Evening (De avond is ongemak), was published in 2018 and received the ANV Debut Prize. In 2020, Rijneveld and translator Michele Hutchison jointly won the International Booker Prize for the English translation, making Rijneveld the first Dutch author to receive the award. Their second novel, My Heavenly Favourite (Mijn lieve gunsteling, 2020), further established their reputation for psychologically intense and formally distinctive fiction. Rijneveld’s writing explores grief, sexuality, religion, power and the uneasy relationship between imagination and reality.
