La Superba

"An ode to the imagination."—NRC Handelsblad A joy to read, La Superba, winner of the most prestigious Dutch literary prize, is a Rabelaisian, stylistic tour-de-force. Migration, legal and illegal, is at the center of this novel about a writer who becomes trapped in his walk on the wild side in mysterious and exotic Genoa, the labyrinthine port city nicknamed "La Superba." Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (b. 1968), poet, dramatist, novelist, renowned in the Netherlands as a master of language, is the only two-time winner of the Tzum Prize for "the most beautiful sentence written in Dutch" (including one in La Superba!).

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (b. 1968), a classicist by training, made his debut with the poetry collection van de vierkante man (of the square man, 1999), an homage to the experimental poetry of his great models, Pindar and Lucebert. In the years that followed, in addition to poetry, he has written stage plays, essays, columns, travel accounts, stories, political satires and four novels written in the spirit of Rabelais. In Het grote baggerboek (The Big Book of Dredgings, 2004) and Het ware leven, een roman (Real Life: A Novel, 2006) he played a game with world literature and divided the critics between those proclaiming him a genius and those who thought him an antiquated stylist. He's a bit of both. La Superba is Pfeijffer's masterpiece, and it has been greeted with unanimous enthusiasm, including the most prominent recognition with the awarding of Libris Literatuurprijs, the Netherlands' most prestigious literary award.
Michele Hutchison (1972) lives in Amsterdam and translates from Dutch and French. She has translated Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Joris Luyendijk, Simone van der Vlugt, Esther Gerritsen and Pierre Bayard, alongside a number of children's books, graphic novels and poems. She also works as an editor and blogger.