Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer Comments

1. Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (born 17 January 1968 in Rijswijk, The Netherlands) is a Dutch poet, novelist, polemicist and classical scholar. He was born in Rijswijk, Netherlands, and studied, lived and worked in Leiden, and he moved permanently to Genoa, Italy, in 2008. He made his début in 1998 with a collection entitled Of the Square Man, containing of fifty-odd highly individualistic poems. This debut won him the 1999 C. Buddingh’ poetry prize.

2 As well as a poet, Pfeijffer was for some time a Greek scholar on the staff of Leiden University, but after reading Classics and a stint of teaching he decided that the bohemian lifestyle of a poet, writer and journalist suited him better. His first book of poems, in 1998, earned him the C. Buddingh' prize (‘Pfeijffer invaded poetry like Genghis Khan’, his publisher writes) .

3. Five acclaimed collections later, he was invited to write the 2015 Dutch Poetry Week gift book, producing an ambitious sonnet corona, Giro giro tondo: An obsession. A prolific drinker and an even more prolific writer, Pfeijffer has written novels, essays, plays and lyrics (for singer Ellen ten Damme) , while simultaneously becoming one of the Netherlands’ leading contemporary poets.