Kusôzu of oefenen om uiteen te vallen

Anna van der Kruis received a grant to write a new book. In her debut novel 821 mensen die er ook toe doen, author Anna supplemented personal passages about grief and loneliness with stories of fictional characters. Whereas contemporaries and like-minded souls frequently use facts or quotes from great writers in their work, Anna interspersed 821 mensen die er ook toe doen with news items from the newspaper and conversations she heard on terraces or in passing on the street. It yielded a world that reveals itself slowly to the reader - ''like a Polaroid picture slowly develops,'' Spinvis said. Her new book, Kusôzu of oefenen om uiteen te vallen, consists again of found footage and autobiographical material. From 129 hyper-short fragments and at least as many impressions to the nine stages of disintegration in nine delineated stories - which add up to a larger whole.

Anna worked for fifteen years in theater, for production houses and festivals. Since 2016, she has been developing new forms of art criticism. She is the daughter of a photographer and graphic designer and a physician's assistant. From her father she learned to look, to frame, to choose, from her mother to listen, to be present, to endure. In addition to her work as a prose writer, Anna also works in the mental health system. There she writes portraits for misfits and dissenters. She often zooms in on contemporary symbols, such as smartphones and sashimi. But ultimately her stories deal with universal themes: friendship, goodbyes, loneliness.