Heavenly Life Selected Poems

?Prize-winning poet, essayist, dramatist and actor Ramsey Nasr, born 1974 in Rotterdam into a Palestinian-Dutch family, was voted Poet Laureate of the Netherlands in 2009. He selected the poems in Heavenly Life from his collections and works written as poet laureate. His award-winning translator, David Colmer, has dynamically recreated in English the patterns and sounds of Ramsey's inventive, bold and thoughtful poems. The collection includes a three-part poem inspired by the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the title poem written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of composter Gustav Mahlers birth, and the poem that voted Nasr into his laureate post.

Ruth Padel is an award-winning British poet, Professor of Poetry at King’s College, London, with close links to Greece, music and conservation. She has published eleven poetry collections, shortlisted for all major UK prizes. They include "Darwin – A Life in Poems", a verse biography of her great-great grandfather Charles Darwin; T"he Mara Crossing" on human and animal migration; "Learning to Make an Oud" in Nazareth, on the Middle East; "Tidings", a narrative poem on homelessness and Christmas, and most recently "Emerald", an elegy for her 97-year-old mother. Ramsey Nasr is a prize-winning author of poetry, of essays, dramas, librettos, newspaper articles and opinion pieces, and also a gifted and award-winning film and theatre actor and director. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1974, into a Palestinian-Dutch family, he graduated in 1995 from the Antwerp drama school Studio Herman Teirlinck. He has acted in many films, working with the Amsterdam Theatre Group including with his stage text for “Death in Venice” (2019), a co-production with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra based on the novella by Thomas Mann, in which he played the lead role. Victor Schiferli (b. 1967, the Netherlands) is a writer and poet, and international advisor for fiction at the Dutch Foundation for Literature (www.letterenfonds.nl), supporting the translation of books from the Netherlands. He made his debut with a poetry collection Aan een open raam (At An Open Window, 2000, nominated for the C. Buddingh’ debut of the year award), which was followed by Verdwenen obers (Vanished Waiters, 2005) and Toespraak in een struik (A Speech In The Bushes, 2008, nominated for the Hugues C. Pernath Prize). David Colmer is an Australian translator of Dutch literature across a range of genres. He has won many awards for his translations, most notably the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker), the Vondel Prize, and Australian and Dutch awards for his body of work. David Colmer has published more than fifteen poetry translations in recent years, including books by Hugo Claus, Cees Nooteboom, Paul van Ostaijen, Ester Naomi Perquin, Annie M.G. Schmidt and Menno Wigman.