Poison

Lot Vekemans (born 1965) studied social geography at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and trained at the Schrijversvakschool ’t Colofon in Amsterdam, graduating in 1993. Since 1995 she has written numerous plays. In 2005 she received the prestigious Van der Vies Prijs for Truckstop and Zus van. Her play Gif (Poison) was awarded the 2010 Taalunie Toneelschrijfprijs for the best Dutch play staged that year. In 2012 her first novel Een bruidsjurk uit Warschau (A Bridal Gown from Warsaw) was published and nominated for the 2012 Anton Wachterprijs for the best Dutch/Flemish debut. The novel has been translated into Norwegian and German. In 2016 she received Germany’s Ludwig Müllheims Theaterpreis, the first time the prize has gone to a foreign playwright. Her plays have been translated into fifteen languages and have been staged successfully in more than twenty countries around the world.Rina Vergano is a leading translator of Dutch and Flemish plays, as well as poetry, libretti and films, and specialises in work for younger audiences and musical theatre. She has translated around seventy plays by leading Dutch and Flemish playwrights (many award-winning in their country of origin) for performance and publication. She is also a theatre journalist and playwright.

'Almost unbearably tense, delicate yet tough… Vekemans's writing is unflinching, its sparse language and aching silences charged with scarcely articulated pain... profoundly rewarding'