Tessa van Rooije winner of Nieuwe Types

On Sunday afternoon 4 October Tessa van Rooijen, fourth-year student of ArtEZ Creative Writing, won Nieuwe Types (New Types), the prize for the best graduation project of a Dutch or Flemish writing course. The winning text is titled prooidier (prey) and is a collection of poems. It was the sixth me that this prize was awarded.

An independent jury, consisting of Pete Wu (writer, journalist, editor at De Gids), Willemijn Lindhout (independent editor), Anna Schoen (actress, theatre-maker, artistic director of tgECHO) and Jeroen Dera (Dutch specialist, poetry critic at De Standaard and editor at DW B), judged these texts anonymously. The winner receives a sum of money sponsored by the courses, an online publication at De Gids and a performance on a yet to be determined programme of De Nieuwe Oost | Wintertuin.

From the jury report
‘A remarkably mature collection of poems with a strongly engaged view. The poems are often physical and direct: the poetess is searching for her place in society where patriarchy still rules. Why should she and her voice have to join the queue as a woman or queer? This militant view of the world around her was praiseworthy to the jury.’
In addition to the substantive arguments, the jury was also convinced by the form. According to the jury, ‘the appetite for experimentation and the pleasure of storytelling were abundantly clear. ‘Form and content are always deliberately attuned to each other and reinforce each other [...]. The jury is also impressed by the mutual coherence of the poems in the collection, in which the whole is the sum of the parts.’

ArtEZ Creative Writing student Francis Nagy received an honourable mention for her novella morgen ruikt naar tijgers (tomorrow smells of tigers): ‘This is powerful prose where every sentence is in the right place, and a very big world is conjured up in very few sentences.’