Lieke Marsman is the author of two books of poetry, Wat ik mijzelf graag voorhoud (Things I Tell Myself) and De eerste letter (The First Letter), for which she has received several awards, including the C. Buddingh’ Award and the Van der Hoogt Prize. Her first novel, Het tegenovergestelde van een mens (The Opposite of a Person), which incorporates poetry and non-fiction to address questions of climate change and loneliness, was published in 2017 by Atlas Contact. Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Edinburgh. 'small white monkeys', a text on self-expression, self-help and shame, was published by Book Works in 2017 as part of a commissioned residency at Glasgow Women’s Library. Her first collection of poems 'Who Is Mary Sue?' was published by Faber & Faber in 2018.

'Marsman’s poems crackle with dry insight, discerning yet anxious, flirting with that well-timed moment whenever the joke must end; her unflinching rhetoric neither sentimentalises death nor shies away from the accessible comforts of life. [...] The satirical wit and self-reflexivity in Marsman’s persuasive poems jabs its fingers right into a certain faddish Western class-anxiety but the narrator never lets us forget. [...] Through letters written to Marsman, Collins tackles issues including shame and autonomy, as well as criticising the mechanical and patriarchal language of contemporary review culture. These cerebral disclosures become valuable spaces allowing us to encounter, through a one-sided conversation, a translation process no longer hidden; the amount of space given to Collins feels powerful, made more so by the absence of Marsman’s (presumed, but never seen) responses. Although Collins writes about self-doubt and anxiety, there is an absolute certitude in her beliefs about how the field of translation can become more conscientious; through her work Collins has undoubtedly lifted herself from a “neutral entity” into an active participant in the most crucial dialogues surrounding Anglophone poetry translation today. [...] These are timely books adamant about candidly highlighting their own assemblies. [...] Instead they offer rewarding new ways of seeing translations as poetic sites of engagement with the subversive. The visibility of their translators places everybody involved on a level that resists traditional hierarchies, gender roles and capitalist understanding: they revolt against fluency and, in doing so, tap into a pocket of structural-societal questioning that refuses to be minimised or made invisible.' Jay G. Ying, The Poetry Society