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Marijke Schermer is a novelist and playwright. Her stage work has been performed by several companies and translated into various languages. Her novel Noodweer (""Severe Weather"") was shortlisted for the ECI Literature Prize in 2017 and subsequently sold to Spain, Switzerland, and Denmark. In 2019, her novel Love, If That's What It Is was published in Dutch and Schermer was hailed as ""fast becoming one of the most interesting writers in the Netherlands."" Love, If That's What It Is was shortlisted for the prestigious Libris Literature Prize 2020 and is her first work to be published in English. Hester Velmans was born in Amsterdam, but lived in five different countries while growing up, before finally settling in western Massachusetts. She is the author of the popular children's books Isabel of the Whales and Jessaloup's Song. The recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2014, she was previously awarded the Vondel Prize for her translation of Renate Dorrestein's A Heart of Stone. Her most recent novel, Slipper, was published in April 2018.
Praise for Love, If That's What It Is Marijke Schermer flawlessly analyzes how love takes its course. --Het Parool On every page Schermer excels with sentences that seem ordinary, but are packed with meaning. After every striking sentence, I had to put the book down for a while. This book is about love--if that's what it is, of course--and who has not become love's victim? --Trouw Schermer's technical ingenuity traps you, making you question your standards, assumptions, and blind spots. This is a big and definitive, but also investigative, story about love. Schermer is fast becoming one of the most interesting writers in the Netherlands. --NRC Handelsblad Schermer's fresh style adds something really new to the mountain of stories about falling in love, unhappy marriages, cheating, and heartbreak--she seems to have cleared the dust of the whole theme. --De Volkskrant Love, If That's What It Is has the potential to become as successful as Herman Koch's The Dinner. --De Standaard This novel has just as careful and poetic a style and as precise a construction as her previous two. Schermer effortlessly manages to infect you again with the feelings of the novel's characters. --Tzum
