Dutch Writer Tjibbe Veldkamp Wins Prestigious Children’s Literature Prize with Magical Realist Fairy Tale

Children’s literature

Tjibbe Veldkamp. — © Wisemice

The most important prize for children’s and youth literature in the Netherlands goes to an original fairy tale about a “possible” boy who goes to great lengths to be born.

A winter day in a historic Eastern European city. A man and a woman walk across the stone bridge over the river in opposite directions. Flakes dance around them. The man slips and in his attempt to stay upright he drags the woman into his fall. “There they lay, Vaclav and Zdenka, in each other’s arms, their faces so close that the breath of one warmed the lips of the other.” It sounds like the opening lines of a romantic story. But then another intriguing sentence follows: “At that moment the possible child appeared.”

That is the premise of The Boy Who Loved the World, the atmospheric magical-realist fairy tale with which Dutch writer Tjibbe Veldkamp won the Woutertje Pieterse Prize. The child is called Adem – for now – and looks like a normal 11-year-old boy, except that he floats. After all, he is not really there yet: he was created by the spark that ignites between the man and the woman on the ground. He may be born, or he may not, when they go their separate ways again. And it looks like it will be the latter.

But Adem immediately loves life so much that he wants to do everything he can to get his parents together. To achieve this, he receives an advance on life from a benevolent spirit – an hourglass indicates the time left for him to complete his mission. That’s not easy. His possible parents are extremes: Zdenka a diligent police detective, Vaclav an activist who writes protest slogans on the walls at night against the corrupt, dictatorial government.

Little classic

Adem lives to the fullest, with the look of a child seeing everything for the first time. He feels the winter cold on his cheeks, tastes goulash, is robbed by his only friend, and then has to find food himself without money. But he learns quickly. “Rule 1. I must beware of the world. But the world must also watch out for me.”

Originality: check, atmosphere: check, heart-warming characters: check. The boy who loved the world has everything to become a minor classic. A nice winner, then. Veldkamp took it from The rope and the truth by Marco Kunst and Jeska Verstegen, The spider and the key by Anna Woltz, Umbrador by Marieke Smithuis and Jeska Verstegen, Maksie by Mathilde Stein and Jan Jutte and A slime kiss for your grandmother by Matthijs Meeuwsen and Paco Vink. The Woutertje Pieterse Prize is the largest prize for children’s and youth literature in the Netherlands. There is a monetary award of 15,000 euros involved.

2024-04-06 11:00:00


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