Guus Kuijer. Award Laureate 2012 1
style, but especially because of its ruthless cri
ticism of the way the adult world relates to children. Guus Kuijer’s major breakthrough came with the five books about the girl Polleke, published between 1999 and 2001. In the first book, Voor altijd samen, amen (1999, Together Forever, Amen), the 11-year-old Polleke herself is the narrator. Here Kuijer widens the social perspective to take in some of the challenges of modern society: ethnic tensions, drug abuse and new family structures. All this and more is part of Polleke’s world. Without ever moralizing, Kuijer lets Polleke observe the world through clear eyes, enabling the reader to do likewise. Like so many of Guus Kuijer’s other works, the Polleke series is aimed at readers on the cusp of their teenage years. The protagonists are confronted both with current social issues and with life’s big questions. In Kuijer’s works, children are individuals with their own opinions and thoughts that deserve to be taken seriously. Kuijer’s two most recent children’s books, Het boek van alle dingen (2004, The Book of Everything) and Florian Knol (2006), are more fanciful in character. The former is set in 1951 and tells the story of nine-year-old Thomas, born the same year as Kuijer. Thomas has a strictly religious father, who abuses both his wife and his son. Abhorrence of tyranny and religious dogmatism permeates the book, but there is also room for humour and warmth. Even in this story of autocratic power, the underlying perspective is optimistic. Thomas’ only wish is to be happy when he grows up, and he discovers that the route to happiness is to stop being afraid. Het boek van alle dingen is, like the Polleke series, firmly rooted in the era in which it is set, but in this case there is also a transformation of reality that allows for surreal imagery and visionary flights of fancy. While Thomas moves seamlessly between reality and fantasy, his father has lost all notion of what it is like to be a child and the difference between right and wrong. Het boek van alle dingen is about what happens when one loses oneself and one’s capacity for independent thought. As is typical in Kuijer’s works, the dialogue carries the story and contributes to the subtle and sensitive characterization. The mixture of reality and fantasy recurs in Florian Knol. Florian is a philosophical young man of about 10 who discovers that what is normal for one person may seem strange to another. A sparrow takes up residence one day in Florian’s red hair, but it soon turns out that the sparrow actually lives in the hair of an old lady, also a redhead. The old lady has