Jeroen Theunissen © photo private

Jeroen Theunissen [Belgium]

Jeroen Theunissen was born in Ghent in August 1977, and studied Germanic languages at Ghent University. Later he worked as a teacher of English and German. Today, he has a part-time job teaching at the film and theater school RITCS in Brussels, and is a teacher of creative writing, among other things. Both his prose and his poetry possess an underlying social critique and engagement, which is challenged at the same time. This is why he is sometimes described as the sociologist of Flemish literature. His characters are ‘ordinary’ people who have washed up in recognisable lives, but whose immense inner unrest causes them to falter and ultimately derail.

In January 2004, Theunissen debuted at Meulenhoff publishers with the novel De onzichtbare (tl: The Invisible). This was followed by three collections of poetry, Thuisverlangen (2005, tl: Homesickness), Het zit zo(2009, tl: How it Is) and Hier woon je (2015, tl: This Is Where You Live).  He published the novels A Form of Fatigue (2008), The bell jar (2010), The Detours (2013), Innocence (2014) and Your Skin (2018). In 2022, I = Cartographer, a personal travelogue of a walk across Europe, was published. This book was met with high praise, being many books in one. An account of a walking tour. A clumsy attempt at grabbing onto our rapidly changing world. A story of a man who runs from his responsibilities, comes back and tries to create a home for his children.

In 2024 he published One Week, a short novel that paints with compassion, love and lightness the portrait of a woman unlucky enough to die too young. This is not a novel about death, but about life, about the joy of living, about the impossibility of death as long as you breathe.

He has two sons and lives in Ghent.