Bart Moeyaert: Belgium ★ Author

The Flemish-speaking Belgian author, Bart Moeyaert, is the seventh son in a family from Bruges. His first novel, Duet met valse noten [The Off-Key Duet], was written when he was just nineteen. This award-winning autobiography was subsequently turned into a play and a musical, and has been translated into several languages. As a result of the success of this work, Moeyaert has been able to work full time as a writer for the full span of his career. In addition to his novels, Moeyaert has also produced translations from French, English and German as well as screenplays, articles, picture books, plays for the theater and, most recently, poetry. He was the city poet of Antwerp for two years, from 2006 to 2008.

After the success of his autobiography, Moeyaert returned to his own family history in Broere (De Oudste, de stilste, de echtste, de verste, de liefste, de snelste en ik) [Brother (the Oldest, the Quietest, the Truest, the Farthest, the Loveliest, the Fastest and Me)]. This series of 33 vignettes of life in a family with seven boys presents a view of Belgian childhood in the late 1960s and early 1970s that also works well in translation. It is a heart-warming collection, with less focus on the darker emotions found in his novels.

Moeyaert is particularly praised for his poetic language and his willingness to address difficult topics with a light touch. Many of his stories incorporate existential questions in a way that makes them approachable. In De Schepping [The Creation], for instance, a little man sits beside God and watches as the world is created, and functions as the rather skeptical narrator. His questions, such as “Why am I here?” meet no response from God, who focuses on what he is doing, not why he does these things before falling asleep and leaving the narrator alone with the woman he has created.

Moeyaert refuses to offer readers simple views of the world, and stresses the need for children’s literature “to show all four corners of the room and not only the middle, where the children’s play mat is. All the corners. The dark ones included”. And whilst he is happy to embrace the text that falls in the middle, it is clear from his work that he has taken the task of exploring the dark corners upon himself.