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Alfred Schaffer (The Netherlands)Festival Poems
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The Dutch-Aruban Alfred Schaffer (1973) grew up in The Hague, The Netherlands. Between 1996 and 2004 he studied and worked at the University of Cape Town. Between 2005 and 2010 he lived in Amsterdam where he worked as an editor in Dutch publishing. He currently works as a lecturer at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
Schaffer made his poetry debut in 2000. His most recent collections are the bibliophile Postuum. Een lofzang (Posthumous. A hymn, 2016) and Mens Dier Ding (Man Animal Thing, 2014), which won three major poetry prizes in The Netherlands and in Belgium, and is translated into French, English and Afrikaans. Man Animal Thing tells the history of nineteenth-century South-African army leader Chaka Zulu and the ways in which he has been perceived through time. ‘This poetry is raw, strikingly sincere, horribly silly’, according to the jury of the prestigious Charlotte Köhler Prize. ‘Its political commitment is constantly being put under pressure by an ironic tone, a play with countless poetic and even non-poetic verse forms.’ |
