Kristien Hemmerechts (born 1955) is a good writer. If there is any fly in the ointment it is, as with Maarten 't Hart, which Peter D mentions on the Dutch Literature thread, that she does have a rather circumscribed number of topics she writes about: men & women and their fraught relationships, women in a kind of sisterly relationship, and one or two other things. But she writes well about them. And one topic she focusses on a lot is the deaths of children. Two of her own died, so she knows this topic only too well from personal experience.
On the whole, her volume of collected stories ("Alle verhalen"), now almost a decade old and containing some 60 stories, is certainly worth dipping into. For those who do read Dutch, stories such as "Brokstukken", "Roza", "De overkant", "Kerst", etc., all have their atmosphere.
I tried to translate one of her novels into English called "Veel vrouwen, en nu en dan een man" (Many Women and the Odd Man), but I was snubbed by her then literary agent who said (this in about 2001) that her 1995 novel was too old (!) to promote. The literary agent was Dutch herself, i.e. not Flemish like Hemmerechts, and also managed to say that although her colleague (a native-speaker of English) found my excerpt translation OK, she herself had found unidiomatic phrases
in the English. I still think: what a bloody cheek! What a
betweter!
Unfortunately, Hemmerechts, who actually started her writing career in the English language (!) with a few stories, has never broken through in translation into our language. Although the cheeky Dutch literary agent may have something to do with this, I am quite unable to understand why this author, who has written so much, has had such abysmal success with English translations. I haven't bothered trying to translate her work into English for years after that brush with her literary agent - but nor does anyone else seem to have done.
A small picture of her:
Her bibliography (roman = novel; korte verhalen = short-stories; novelle = novella; reisverhalen = travel stories; dagboek = diary):
Bibliography - Kristien Hemmerechts
- Een zuil van zout, 1987 (novelle)
- Weerberichten, 1988 (korte verhalen)
- Brede heupen, 1989 (roman)
- 's Nachts, 1989 (korte verhalen)
- Zonder Grenzen, 1991 (roman)
- Kerst en andere liefdesverhalen, 1992 (korte verhalen)
- Wit zand, 1993 (roman)
- Lang geleden, 1994 (verhalen)
- Amsterdam Retour, 1995 (reisverhalen)
- Veel vrouwen, af en toe een man, 1995 (roman)
- Kort kort lang, 1996 (korte verhalen)
- Margot en de engelen, 1997 (roman)
- Taal zonder mij, 1998
- De tuin der onschuldigen, 1999 (roman)
- De kinderen van Arthur, 2000 (roman)
- O, toen alles nog voorbij kon gaan, 2000 (kort proza)
- Donderdagmiddag.Halfvier., 2002 (roman)
- Een jaar als (g)een ander, 2003 (dagboek)
- De laatste keer, 2004 (roman)
- V, notities bij een reis naar Vietnam, 2004 (reisverslag)
- De waar gebeurde geschiedenis van Victor en Clara Rooze, 2005 (roman)
- Als een kinderhemd, 2006 (verhalen)
She's written quite a lot over the decades and lives in a country right next door to Britain where she has worked as a university lecturer in English literature and creative writing. But the Brits and Yanks seem to have roundly snubbed her, with a little help from others.
