Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is a Dutch writer born in 1991 in Nieuwendijk, the Netherlands, who grew up in a strict Dutch Reformed agricultural community. They studied at the Utrecht School of the Arts. The Discomfort of Evening (2018, translated by Michele Hutchinson) is their debut novel, following a farming family's disintegration after the accidental death of a child, written in Rijneveld's extraordinary run-on style. It won the International Booker Prize in 2020. My Heavenly Favourite (2023, translated by Michele Hutchinson) is their third work, a dark and formally bold novel narrated by a veterinarian in a strict rural Dutch Reformed community who becomes entangled in a transgressive relationship with a teenage girl. It won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2024. Rijneveld is also a poet, and their collection Kalfsvlies (2015) won the C. Buddingh'-prijs. Rijneveld uses they/them pronouns and writes in Dutch with a prose style characterised by compound sentences, rural imagery, and the grammar of religious childhood.