Maria Barnas

Maria Barnas (1973) is a poet, writer, critic, and visual artist. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She won the C. Buddingh’ Prize for her first collection of poetry, Twee zonnen (Two Suns, 2003) and in 2009 she received the J.C. Bloem Prize for Er staat een stad op (A City Rises, 2007). In 2014 her collection Ja, ja, de oerknal (Yeah-yeah the Big Bang), was nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize. She published a novel in 2017, Altid Augustus (Always Augustus), and in 2018 her poetry collection Nachtboot (Night Boat) appeared, for which she was shortlisted for the Netherlands’ most prestigious poetry award, De Grote Poëzieprijs. In 2022 she published Diamant zonder r (Diamond without an ‘r’), a sequence of poems about the question of which language one belongs to and about her Polish grandmother. Her work has been described as ‘contemplative, musical poetry, desperate and humorous, powerful and brittle, with a transparency that gets more complex on re-reading’. Her latest collection Night Boat & Other Poems was translated from Dutch into English by Donald Gardner and published by Shearsman Books in February 2025.

Maria Barnas’ attendance at West Cork Literary Festival is supported by the Dutch Foundation for Literature/Nederlands Letterenfonds as part of their New Dutch Writing programme