29^th Leukerbad International Literary Festival

Authors

Radna Fabias

Netherlands

The Dutch poet and translator Radna Fabias was born in 1983 on Curaçao, where she grew up. She studied at the HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht before publishing her debut poetry collection Habitus in 2018. Critics unanimously declared her debut a masterwork. Fabias has been awarded every important poetry prize in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Fabias’ poetry is multifaceted: at times highly condensed, at times almost epically narrated, linguistically it lies between maximum accessibility and maximum experimentalism. “Fabias dares to use every corner of poetry as an artistic form,” wrote De Groene. This also applies to the contents of her writing: her poetry moves from the tender to the pitiless when it addresses belonging, sexuality, or religion. The habitus—cultural models handed down over generations—is precipitated out by the frequent repetition in the poems. With its rhythm, its complicated view of human existence, and its engagement with large social issues like racism, sexism, and Dutch colonial history, Habitus is a deeply political but never one-dimensional work.
Radna Fabias is an active translator as well as a poet. She has translated works by Warsan Shire and the Nobel Prize winning poet Louise Glück among others into Dutch.

Habitus. Poems. Translated into German by Stefan Wieczorek. ELIF 2022

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