Koenraad Kuiper
Doctor poet Frank Koenegracht is, as it says in his publicity, ‘one of the best, albeit not yet best-known, poets of the Dutch language area.’ For a day job he has been a psychiatrist specialising in sleep disorders.
He was born in Rotterdam in 1945 and has published ten volumes of poetry all with De Bezige Bei (The Busy Bee). He has received two prizes for his work: in 1990 the Anna Blaman Prize an in 2001 the Frans Erens Prize for his collective work.
His poetry often employs a vernacular style and picks up pop music allusions, has flashes of humour but is seriously involved with the human condition.
One day when I was seventeen I woke up in a hospital. The ward was long and echoey. Far away, I saw a nurse’s station with a couple of figures moving behind its glass. Mine was the last bed in a row of identical beds, next to a window. It was a windy, cloudy day. The last thing I remembered it had been evening, and I was at home.
On the bookmark inside 