Truus Matti

Truus Matti, born 1961 in the Netherlands, worked as an editor at several publishers and as a freelance writer, before applying to Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam, where she made film and animation.Her debut as a writer came with the novel »Vertrektijd« (2007; en. »Departure Time«). In this story, a twelve-year-old girl mourns her father who has died in a swimming accident. The story is artfully interwoven with a second story, which plays in a kind of surreal parallel world and tells of a girl who turns up in the desert with no memory. She finally manages to get to a secluded hotel at the sea which is inhabited by strange speaking animals. The stories gradually become more and more interlinked. »Vertrektijd« is a multi-layered and tense coming-of-age story in which Matti speaks in poetic language of the relativity of fantasy and reality, of grief and loss and, not least, about how a girl has to learn to generate new strength in life from negative experiences. In her second novel »Mister Orange« (2011) Matti tells the fictitious story of the 13-year-old Linus who works as a delivery boy for fruit and vegetables in the urban jungle of Manhattan. He also regularly delivers a box of oranges to a painter he calls Mister Orange. His discussions with him open up the world of modern art to Linus as well as his own world of imagination. It is not until the story is finished that the reader learns that Mister Orange is actually the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) who left Europe because of the war and spent the last years of his life in New York. »Mister Orange« draws an atmospheric picture of the New York of the 1940s and tells us about the art and vision of the painter Piet Mondrian, about the rhythm of Boogie-Woogie music, about the Second World War – and not least about a boy who discovers not only himself but a completely new world both of the heart and of the mind.Truus Mattis’ books have been and will be translated into six languages and have received many national and international awards, among these the Silberner Griffel and the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the American translation. Truus Matti lives in Amsterdam.

Bitte umsteigen! DresslerHamburg, 2009 [Ü: Verena Kiefer]

Apfelsinen für Mister Orange Gerstenberg Hildesheim, 2013 [Ü: Verena Kiefer]

www.truusmatti.nl