Willemijn van Dijk has won the 2019 BNG Bank Literature Award for her novel Het wit en het purper (The White and the Purple). This was announced by jury chair Hetty Hafkamp on Thursday, 16 January 2020, at the Amstelkerk in Amsterdam. Van Dijk is the fifteenth winner of the BNG Bank Literature Award. The prize is worth €15,000 and includes a sculpture by Theo van Eldik.
These three authors were nominated for this year's prize.
The jury consists of four members: jury chair Hetty Hafkamp (mayor of Bergen), Jacqueline Bel (professor of Modern Dutch Literature at VU University Amsterdam), Arjan Peters (literary critic and editor of de Volkskrant) and Arie Storm (writer and critic).
The readers' jury, consisting of people who work at BNG Bank, also chose Van Dijk as the winner. This was announced by the chairman of the jury, Tim Segboer, Head of Capital Management at BNG Bank. The prize consists of a one-month stay of the winner's choice at the Roland Holsthuis in Bergen.
From the jury report:
'In Willemijn van Dijk's first novel, Het wit en het purper (The White and the Purple), a reference to the toga worn by Pallas (but perhaps also a nod to Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir from 1830), the author chooses the perspective of this Pallas, an outsider in the imperial family, a slave who is freed and who, thanks to his good connections, unexpectedly rises to the top, gaining control of the finances of the entire Empire under the disfigured Emperor Claudius. In fact, he is then more powerful than the emperor.
Van Dijk shows the other side of history by putting himself in the shoes of a man who was able to observe everything up close – the intrigue, the brutality, the debauchery, the anti-Semitism, and the role of women, who at the time were not allowed to attend Senate meetings, but who often played a significant role behind the scenes.
Pallas works his way up, learns to be opportunistic, plays political games and becomes a wealthy man. His ambition proves fatal when he helps pave the way for Emperor Nero, who will plunge the Empire into chaos.
Thus, Het wit en het purper is a novel about history, but also about power and what you are willing to sacrifice for it, and about conformity that can go so far that you deny your own background.
In controlled, sometimes somewhat stately language, Willemijn van Dijk shows that Roman times are not so far removed from us.
Pallas works his way up, learns to be opportunistic, plays political games and becomes a wealthy man. His ambition proves fatal when he helps pave the way for Emperor Nero, who will plunge the Empire into chaos.
Thus, Het wit en het purper (The White and the Purple) is a novel about history, but also about power and what you are willing to sacrifice for it, and about conformity that can go so far that you deny your own background.
In controlled, sometimes somewhat stately language, Willemijn van Dijk shows that Roman times are not as distant from us as we might think; the dilemmas and intrigues she describes are, if we are honest, not unfamiliar to us.