Raptors

Tellegen Toon

With the economy of proverbs and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence "Raptors" depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grotesque and pathetic. Tellegen's mercurial imagination evokes the dark archetypes of European folklore and reanimates them with a sophisticated sense of the endless fluidity of relationships, the instability of interpretation. An improvisation on a theme, circling back to 'my father' at the start of each poem, Raptors builds to a story without narrative, its extravagant imaginative leaps into absurdity held within a framework of tender observation. Toon Tellegen's translator Judith Wilkinson has worked closely with the poet to create English poems that capture the startling clarity and inventiveness of the original Dutch. "Raptors" has the rewarding intensity of a modern classic.

About the Author

Toon Tellegen was born in 1941 on one of the islands in the south-west of the Netherlands. He is one of the best-known Dutch writers, with a long list of awards to his name. In 2007 he received two major prizes for his entire oeuvre. He considers himself in the first place a poet and has published more than twenty collections of poetry to date, but he is also a novelist and a prolific and popular children's author. Toon Tellegen lives in Amsterdam with his wife, and worked as a GP until his recent retirement. He gives frequent readings of his work, often with musical accompaniment; in 2009 he read the whole of "Raafvogels" ("Raptors") at the Perdu theatre in Amsterdam.

In November 2011, "Raptors" was awarded the Popescu Prize for poetry translated from a European language into English. The judges said: "His [Tellegen's] complex, often surreal and always highly affecting poems exhibit an understanding of the power of the story in which the dream-like psychology, the marvellously nuanced telling of a family's malaise set him apart as an entirely distinctive voice in European poetry".

Reviews

Awards won by Toon Tellegen
Winner, 2011 Poetry Society Popescu Prize for Translation (Raptors)

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