Poetry x Guiding Voices - A conversation with Astrid Lampe

Poetry International and Guiding Voices join forces annually during our festival in June, offering audiences a chance to get to know a poet better. Guiding Voices' interviews seek the deeper layer and get both the interviewed writer and the audience thinking.
This year, Ernest van der Kwast will interview recent P.C. Hooft Prize winner Astrid Lampe, who has long held an important place in the Dutch poetry landscape. Her activist and sometimes absurdist work makes one very curious for this extensive conversation!

Astrid Lampe is a Dutch actor, director and poet.
Prior to becoming a poet, Lampe worked in theater and at the Rietveld Academy. Thus, her poetry is closely linked to the performing and visual arts. She defiantly resists conventional notions of poetic beauty and formal consistency and instead presents her audience with a vivid bustle of exciting rhythms, seemingly random but in fact carefully crafted to form a constant stream of narrative twists, turns of phrases and tonal and rhythmic shifts. Nonetheless, her undertone is serious. She is not afraid of controversy or revealing the perverse underbelly of our fascinations, which can leave the audience with a sense of unease.
Lampe has published eight works of poetry. With her debut collection Rib (1997) she was nominated for the C. Buddingh’-prize. She was also nominated for the VSB poetry prize for her subsequent collections De sok weer aan (2000) and De memen van Lara (2002). In 2006, she won the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize for her poetry collection Spuit je RALkleur published in 2005. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish and English and her entire poetic work will be honored with the P.C. Hooftprijs in 2024.