My Heavenly Favourite
Award History
| Award | Year | Status |
|---|---|---|
| James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction | 2024 | Winner |
About This Book
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's third novel (translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchinson) is a dark, formally bold work narrated by a veterinarian in a strict rural Dutch Reformed community who becomes entangled in an intense, transgressive relationship with a teenage girl. The novel explores religious repression, obsession, and the violence latent in pietism, written in Rijneveld's characteristic compound-sentence torrent. It won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2024.
About the Author
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is a Dutch writer born in 1991 in Nieuwendijk, the Netherlands, who grew up in a strict Dutch Reformed agricultural community. They studied at the Utrecht School of the Arts. The Discomfort of Evening (2018, translated by Michele Hutchinson) is their debut novel, following a farming family's disintegration after the accidental death of a child, written in Rijneveld's extraordinary run-on style. Read more →
