Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer is a Dutch poet, playwright, writer, and journalist based in Genoa. 

His first book of poems Van de vierkante man (1998) earned him the C. Buddingh' prize. 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. He was invited to do so again in 2022, writing Monterosso mon amour. 

Pfeijffer’s background as a classicist is more than apparent in his poetry, yet he is fond of drawing from modern life too. Running through his entire oeuvre are questions of authenticity and fantasy, imagination, romantic love, sexual failings, nostalgia, and identity. A commonly posed question is ‘How to live’. Pfeijffer has a wide range of styles and registers, combines high and low and is fond of hyperbole. The poet has a strong sense of comic timing and knows when to use the bathetic or the obscene to good effect. 

Pfeijffer’s poetry collection Idyllen which contains fifty longer, narrative poems in rhyming alexandrines about the sea, and combines poetic expressiveness with political and social commitment, was published in 2015. He won many prestigious awards with this collection, including the VSB Poetry Prize and the E. du Perron Prize. As a novelist Pfeijffer had his international breakthrough with La Superba (2013) for which he was awarded the Libris Prize. As an anthologist Pfeijffer compiled the overview of modern Dutch poetry, De Nederlandse poëzie van de twintigste en eenentwintigse eeuw in 1000 en enige gedichten (2016).