Annemarie Estor

No Man’s Land Night is subtitled ‘a crime-poem’. And indeed this collection is such a narrative, in poetry, full of suspense, about the imagined, divided city of Orb-e-Grout. It is not actually a whodunnit. It is rather a quest for an answer to the question "Where do I come from?" posed by the primary speaker, which triggers an adventurous story full of surprises and inventive associations. The crime that Pili, this speaker, commits, is trepass: she, in the company of her teacher Valeria, crosses the border between Orb and Grout. Orb is a society in which technology and algorithms have taken over and regulate life; the surrounding slum called Grout contains that which is excluded. There, people live in primitive circumstances and poverty. Pili is described as someone feeling uncomfortable in Orb, but the plot really starts when Valeria tells Pili a shocking truth: she has a mother.

In a multi-faceted language and typography Annemarie Estor depicts and critiques a dystopian world that is at the same time magical and exotic, but also terrifyingly recognizable.

Annemarie Estor, born in The Netherlands but living in Antwerp, is the author of four books of poetry in Dutch and the recipient of several literary prizes, among which the Herman de Coninck Prize and the Jan Campert Prize. Annemarie Estor studied Liberal Arts and Sciences at Maastricht University, where she discovered that Literature and Science is her primary field of interest, an interest she continues to research in her poetry today.She has been a fellow at the International School for Theory in the Humanities in Santiago de Compostela and holds a PhD in English Literature from Leiden University.Together with Lies Van Gasse she also published Het boek Hauser (The Book Hauser).




Bibliography
Vuurdoorn me (Firethorn Me), Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam, 2010
De oksels van de bok (The Armpits of the Beast), Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam, 2012
Dit is geen theater meer (This No Longer Is a Stage), Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam, 2015
Niemandslandnacht (No Man’s Land Night), Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam, 2018

Poet's Website
Poet's Publishing House