Work

“What doubt is for science,” wrote the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), “that is irony for personal life.” But in the social debate, irony soon leads to indifference. And Kierkegaard…

Since 1 January 2018, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer has been writing a sonnet about the news for the newspaper every other week. These columns in poetry form are printed every other…

The bitter, touching comedy Just Call It Love stages a relay of encounters in the famous Majestic Imperial Hotel, where hundreds of rooms have room for loneliness. The play follows…

Grand Hotel Europa has dominated the Dutch general bestselling list for an entire year. 200,000 copies have been sold so far. Grand Hotel Europa will be published in English in…

The diary of Anne Frank is more than a sacred book of murdered innocence, a testimony of the Shoah that commands compulsory awe and an untouchable monument that seems to…

‘The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble’ ran the headline in The New York Times in 2013, above an article about an Oxford professor of particle…

An epyllion in Theocritan style about the Trojan War, revisited in a modern age. In rhyming alexandrines.

Letters from Genoa is the natural counterpart to La Superba. It takes place largely in its title city and discusses La Superba and how it was received. However, it is…

This novel is set in Genoa, the labyrinthine port city (nicknamed ‘the Superb’) where the author has been living for the past five years. Migration is the central theme of…

A collection of thirty poems written four-handedly by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Erik Jan Harmens about the fact that the world is falling to pieces.

A short, autobiographical novel about the theft of the Characters by Theophrastus.

“He invaded poetry like Genghis Khan. His scorched verses crushed the serfs and left them trembling with fear and awe. And then he went silent. He spent the next seven…

As a gift for the Week of Dutch and Belgian Poetry 2015, printed in an edition of more than 20 thousand copies, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer wrote a crown of sonnets…

A short novel situated in the ugliest city of the Netherlands (Tilburg).

A textedition with a poetic translation and introduction of the Voces Haganae of the Dutch poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687).

In Minister Kwist we closely follow the final days of the first Rutte cabinet. And by looking over the shoulder of the least well-known minister from that cabinet. Kwist, minister…

A selection of the columns on Dutch and international politics.

At 4pm on June 1st 2008, a poet weighing upwards of 100 kilos and a petite Russian photographer decided to set off from Leiden on their bikes, with the idea…

Every generation has its book of Greek myths. Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer has written one for the 21st century. Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer took the poetry world by storm in 1998 with…

A collection of exactly one hundred very short novels, of a maximum of 500 words each.

An anthology of classical stories about the Dutch city of Leiden, cosen by Onno Blom and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, enriched by new stories especially written for the collection by Maarten…

An anthology of the Dutch poet Lucebert (1924-1994).

Rupert has been accused of a terrible crime, and his imagined defense begins the night he met the love of his life, Mira. By turns shockingly honest, incredibly funny, and…

An anthology of European poetry from Homer until the present day, in the original languages with Dutch translations and an introduction.

An anthology of the poems of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (edited by Özcan Akyol) in the pocket series of classics from Dutch literature.

This collection of Collected Poems 1998-2008 contains the award-winning and acclaimed collections Van de vierkant man (1998), The glimmering of the welkwiek (2001), Dolores (2002) and In the name of…

Two Dutch businessmen wait for the delayed flight to Rome Fiumicino at Malpensa airport near Milan. To kill the time they get into conversation with each other. That is to…

After his avant-garde Pirandello-esque novel, Real Life, Ilja Pfeijffer decided to try out other lives, namely Se- cond Life, a multi-player virtual world accessed via the internet. Economists are fascinated…

A political satire on the conservative restauration policy of the Dutch governments in rhyming alexandrines, set in the near future, when the best actor of the Netherlands takes the dead…

Real Life: a Novel is a book in the tradition of Italo Calvino’s ground-breaking IF ON A WINTER NIGHT’S A TRAVELER. It is at once a gripping and enchanting story…

An anthology of the Dutch poet Hendrik Marsman (1899-1940)

In the name of the dog contains sixteen poems that can truly be called ‘great’ in every respect: each individual poem is a hymn that sings like a dog and…

A poem by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer with artwork by Roos Custers.

This book deals with political propoganda in classical antiquity, exploring the contexts, strategies, and parameters of a fascinating phenomenon that has often been approached with anachronistic models or completely ignored….

An astonishing and shocking literary epic about the world of dredging. You will never read anything else like this. A man who works on a dredging boat bumps into a…

What’s to become of poetry? Everyone is versifying anything, everything is allowed and nothing is bad. High time for new standards and values. The secret of the Murdered Maunder is…

Dolores contains twenty-five compact, exuberant, screamingly recognizable poems about a great love, which, like all great loves, is characterized by despair and failure.

In De Antieken, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer tells classical literature’s tale from Homer to the fall of Rome.  He does so in ways that are so infectious, so original that they…

In his own time Bacchylides was considered the equal of Pindar, the most famous representative of archaic Greek lyric. Until the publication of the London papyrus in 1897; the study…

This book is about passages where Pindar uses the future tense with reference to himself or to his song. It addresses the question as to exactly what the function is…

A study of three epinicia of Pindar, which have in common that they celebrate victories of Aeginetan athletes and that they respond to the contemporary political situation in Aegina and…

From first poem to last, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s debut collection is remarkable for both its rich imagery and sounds and its varied themes and compositions. His ‘butter-baked images and bulimic…