Peter Terrin


Peter Terrin is a Belgian novelist, and a winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. He is the author of several novels and two collections of short stories.

Biography

Terrin's first novel, Kras was published in 2001, and his 2003 novel Blanco, described as a "Kafka-like reality breakdown" and translated into Swedish in 2006 was his breakthrough. Knack, a Belgian weekly that Terrin blogged for, described Blanco as the best Dutch-language novel about the father-son relationship since Ferdinand Bordewijk's Karakter. His third novel, Vrouwen en kinderen eerst was published in 2004.
Terrin's 2009 novel De bewaker, called a "coldly beautiful, dystopian allegory" by Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times, won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2010, and his novel Post mortem won the 2012 AKO Literatuurprijs.
Terrin cites Willem Frederik Hermans as an important influence for his minimalist style, and critics have recognized the influence of J. Bernlef in his prose.

Published books

Novels