Böcker av Charlotte Van den Broeck

Conceived while collaborating with a Dutch artist on a project in Death Valley, California, Charlotte Van den Broeck's The Inside of a Stone explores desert landscapes and womanhood - and the emotional resonance between the two - while reconceptualising their metaphorical relationship. With close observation and striking images she engages with the arid, eroded landscape. In other poems she considers sexual violence while watching a pair of mating turtles, imagines an alternative emotional life for Ilsebill, the fisherman's wife from the Grimm fairytale, and explores medieval poet Hildegard of Bingen's magical healing.After first making her mark as a compelling performer, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe's most innovative and original new voices in poetry. Her first two collections, Chameleon and Nachtroer, were published together in David Colmer's English translation by Bloodaxe in 2020. The Inside of a Stone marks a departure from the themes of those earlier books, which often return to childhood and youth in urban and European landscapes.

'Bold Ventures resembles a pop version of Iain Sinclair's psychogeography or Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's anti-biography of DH Lawrence' Olivia Laing, GUARDIAN'A marvel: a monument to human beings continuing to reach for the skies, even after their plans dissolve in dust' NEW YORK TIMESIn thirteen chapters, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal for their architects - architects who either killed themselves or are rumoured to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire built in seventeenth-century France to a theatre that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC., and an eerily sinking swimming pool in her hometown of Turnhout.Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Charles Darwin to art history, stories from her own life and popular culture, patterns gradually come into focus, as Van den Broeck asks: what is that strange life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator?Threaded through each story, and in prose of great essayistic subtlety, Van den Broeck meditates on the question of suicide - what Albert Camus called the 'one truly serious philosophical problem' - in relation to creativity and public disgrace. The result is a profoundly idiosyncratic book, breaking new ground in literary non-fiction, as well as providing solace and consolation - and a note of caution - to anyone who has ever risked their hand at a creative act.'What a sensible, intelligent and beautiful book' Stefan Hertmans, author of War and Turpentine

After first making her mark as a compelling performer, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe's most innovative and original new voices in poetry. Her first English translation combines her debut volume Chameleon (2015) with its sequel Nachtroer (2017), its title the name of all-night shop in Antwerp where she lives.