To celebrate the publication of Virgula in English, Perdu has the pleasure of hosting Sasja Janssen, Anne Vegter, Michele Hutchison and Jess Chandler. Sasja, Michele and Jess will join us having toured Virgula in England – Sasja its author, Michele its translator and Jess its publisher.

Invoking Virgula (the Latin for comma) as muse and companion, Sasja’s is a book busy with propellant and forward force. For the poet Jack Underwood, the book is notable for its ‘continually breaking its own remarkable fever’. For Nuzhat Bukhari, Virgula ‘allows each feeling and thing to branch into the other’; is a book ‘filled with moments of elation and enchantment’.

As well as Sasja, Michele and Jess, we are delighted to be joined for this evening by Anne Vegter, who from 2013 to 2017 was Poet Laureate of the Netherlands, and across 2021 and 2022 held the position of City Poet of Rotterdam. Vegter’s Eiland berg gletsjer was published in English as Island mountain glacier in 2022 by Prototype and translated by Astrid Alben. Excerpted in the first issue of Perdu’s multilingual magazine Mop Mop, it will be a pleasure to hear Anne read from this and more recent work.

Both Eiland berg gletsjer and Virgula were honoured with the Awater Poetry Prize, and it is a particular thrill to have in prospect these two poets at Perdu together with their collaborators. The evening will feature readings in both Dutch and English, as well as a conversation pointed toward Sasja and Anne’s poetry and the question of translation.