Sasja Janssen wins the Johan Polak Poetry Prize for poetry collection ‘Virgula’

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Sasja Janssen wins the Johan Polak Poetry Prize for her poetry collection Virgula (Querido, 2021). This is a new annual award for a poetry collection, which carries a prize of 50,000 euros. This makes it the largest poetry prize in the Netherlands.

Sasja Janssen is the first winner of the Johan Polak Poetry Prize.Image Roger of the castle

This year, the Johan Polak Poetry Prize will be awarded for the first time to the best Dutch-language collection published in the past three years (2021-2023). The prize was established last year by the legacy foundation of publisher and book collector Johan Polak, with the aim of financing a full-fledged poetry prize on the scale of prizes for novels, such as the Libris Literature Prize.

Virgula (Latin for comma) is Janssen’s seventh collection. In the collection she plays with everything that the comma stands for. It is an attempt to counteract stagnation, just as the comma forces sentences to continue.

The prize will be presented on May 31 at the De Balie debate center in Amsterdam.