Annelies Verbeke is a prominent Belgian author known for her distinctive narrative style and exploration of human experiences. Born in 1976 in Dendermonde, near Brussels, Verbeke has established herself as a significant voice in contemporary European literature. Her work spans novels, short stories, and theater texts, often reflecting a blend of personal insights and societal themes.
Verbeke’s breakout novel “Slaap” (Sleep), published in 2003, introduced readers to her cinematic style, where brevity and sharp observations drive the narrative. The novel, which explores the theme of insomnia, was translated into more than 22 languages and sold over 70,000 copies, marking the beginning of her international recognition. Her other notable works include “30 Days” (Dertig Dagen), a novel that delves into questions of goodness and social justice, and Saving Fish, which tackles environmental concerns.In this conversation, Verbeke shares insights into her creative process, her thoughts on the role of literature in society, and the challenges facing European writers today. She discusses the autobiographical elements of “Slaap”, her preference for leaving room for reader interpretation, and her reflections on the dominance of English-language literature in Europe. Verbeke also touches on her experiences as an advocate for short story collections and addresses the underrepresentation of non-Dutch and non-French-speaking writers in Belgium.
The conversation provides a deep dive into Verbeke’s approach to writing, her commitment to authentic storytelling, and her perspectives on the literary world both in Belgium and beyond.

Dritan Kiçi
Thank you for accepting this interview. I have been thinking about this for so long, after I spoke with your agent and we got the contract for the retranslation of Slaap into Albanian. I love the book. So much so, that I bought the Italian translation too.
Annelies Verbeke
How nice. And you read Italian?
Dritan Kiçi
I wanted to see how the translation was, compared to the original Dutch. What are you writing right now?
Annelies Verbeke
At the moment, I am writing a new novel, which will be my fifth.
Dritan Kiçi
What is it about?
Annelies Verbeke
Ohh… It is very fresh… I am trying to write my own doppelgänger story. There are many writers from past and present that at a certain time have written a doppelgänger novel. And I think this is my time. It’s my turn now.
Dritan Kiçi
There is a lot about you in the media, but can you give us a little bit of your history? Where do you come from?
Annelies Verbeke
I have the feeling that in Dutch and Belgian newspapers and magazines, there is too much of my personal life. Maybe I’m a bit of a private person, but… I grew up in a village near Brussels and went to school there. But I’ve lived in Ghent for most of my life. I started to study literature and language here, English and Dutch. I have lived in this house since 2005, with my partner… We have been together since 2015. He is of Senegalese origin. I touched on that subject, or that kind of character with a Senegalese background, in my novel 30 Days. I don’t have children of my own, but he has two that have been in my life for 15 years now. So this is, yes, my personal story. I write all the time. Mostly short story collections, novels, and theater texts. Like most authors in Belgium, I do a lot of things in front of the public, both in Belgium and in the Netherlands. I also travel a lot. Actually, since my debut, or because of it, well, when my books got translated quite a bit, this has made me travel a lot. Which I like. And so, yeah, what else is there?
Dritan Kiçi
Let’s go to Slaap! or Sleep! in English. This was your debut novel, and to give credit where it’s due, your character is a strange person, but at the same time, wonderful. She has a bit of ambiguity in how she approaches her life, and, to me, she seems angry with herself, her ex-boyfriend, and the world. Why is she like this? Is there anything of you in Maya?
Annelies Verbeke
I think there is something of me in all the characters I write. Even if they are very far apart from me at first sight, I think, as a writer, you always use yourself or you use possibilities within yourself. Yes, this was a problem for me for a very long time—I couldn’t sleep. It is better now, because I had treatment, but sleeping has always been very difficult for me. Very hard to put my mind to rest. So yes, this is an autobiographical aspect of the story. You could say that for both main characters, of course.
Dritan Kiçi
The reviews call your writing “cinematic.” You write short and to the point, and it feels like you don’t care much about explaining yourself. You just say what you want to say, and that’s that. To me, your text is like reading your thoughts. The reader is left to imagine the world’s movement and the passing by of everything else. Don’t you think this is a double-edged sword? Some readers might find it lacking. So, not being comfortable with explaining everything, how do you find the balance between what you write and what readers may want?
Annelies Verbeke
Yeah, I like that question because it is important to me not to explain too much. When I… I read a lot myself, and I don’t like it when the writer leaves nothing to me, nothing to the reader to imagine or to fill in. And if everything is already set, it makes my reading experience a bit boring. On the other hand, I don’t think about it so much while I’m writing—that I am not explaining a lot. But I think it’s about not underestimating the reader. My editor, who has been the same editor since Sleep!, which is kind of special… He calls me sometimes when he reads my stuff, and this is the kind of discussion that we just had now. He says, “You have to give them (the readers) something more here,” and then I say, “No.” I don’t want to. Even before I started writing books, when I was very young, I was writing screenplays. And with one screenplay, one of my teachers said, “You are an underwriter. You leave a lot to the reader, and some of it might work with some readers and not with others.” So yes, this is something that comes naturally and something that also springs from the fact that I, as a reader, like it that way. So I think I always write the book I would like to read myself, and I think it is even so with my short stories because of the structure of the genre, and maybe this is also one of the reasons why I like it so much. Also, as a reader and as a writer, I have put a lot of effort into making the short story collection more important in our language community because commercially, it is very difficult. In short stories, you have the process too, less than in novels though. I ask the reader to just step into the action and see what happens. And, yeah, it all springs, I think, from what I like as a reader.
Dritan Kiçi
So, if you were given a definitive choice, what would you go on writing for the rest of your life: novels or short stories?
Annelies Verbeke
Ah, I don’t want to choose between the novels, the short story collections, and the theater; they are all very different kinds of writing. And I like them all. If I really, really had to choose, then maybe it would be the short story collections, my first love, yes.
Dritan Kiçi
We spoke about your way of thinking and how you write. Do you have a specific method, or are you a casual writer?
Annelies Verbeke
Actually, it is different with every book—the way I manage to complete the book. In short stories, it’s different; I have just a primal idea. So I just sit and write, and I don’t know where I’m going, and I only see where I am when I get there. But in novels, I actually do want to know where I’m going. And this is the problem with what I’m writing at the moment. I still don’t know the ending. I normally don’t plan everything. I’m not the kind of writer who can start writing in the third chapter and then move to the eighth because I know exactly what I am going to write. It doesn’t work that way for me. So, a lot comes while writing… A lot of ideas come while writing, but with novels, I always want to know where I’m going. Uh, and with this novel I’m writing at the moment, I’m still not there. But yeah, then everything starts moving and falling into place, it seems. But yeah, with every novel and even every story that I have written, the process has been different. For example, with 30 Days, I knew that I would talk about somebody’s life over 30 days. And I wanted to do things differently in terms of building a character, but I also wanted to make myself write a bit slower. I mean, at the time, I wanted the story to be a bit longer, and I thought if I write about four pages for every day in his life, then I will really lengthen the time that I talk about the character, and this was interesting. But with my novel Saving Fish, I got a lot of support from the research I did; I read a lot of books about biology, fish, and fisheries, and there it was! Sometimes when I read stuff, it was like perfect metaphors I could use. So the research was really important. But every time, it is different, of course. To go back to my first book, Sleep!, I had written a short story about Maya and a screenplay for a short film about Benoit. Around the same time, when I was really just starting as a writer, I somehow had the feeling that those two belonged together. I thought, yeah, let’s try to meet those two characters. Yeah, let’s make them the characters of a novel. And this is how I started, actually. So every time, there is another, different process.
Dritan Kiçi
So, to go a little bit deeper on character development. Do you build the characters before you write, or do you let the character evolve and build itself?
Annelies Verbeke
Actually, in most of my novels, and in the short story collections too, I start with more of a philosophical theme, something that I have been thinking about a lot. Or some feeling that has been important to that moment in my life. In 30 Days, for example, it is goodness. I wanted to write a book about goodness. Is it possible to be a good person? On the other hand, Saving Fish is very much about despair. So yeah, I always go from there, and then the character comes, and it develops a lot while writing. It’s not like I have a complete picture of how this person is before I start writing.
Dritan Kiçi
OK, your characters have, I think unintentionally, a lack of features. You can imagine them any way you like, so, my daughter imagines Maya differently from how I imagine her.
Annelies Verbeke
Yes, yes, yes! Well, that’s the same thing as what you mentioned before; that I leave a lot of space for the reader, because this is what I like as a reader.
Dritan Kiçi
So…
Annelies Verbeke
That it is not completely explained. I think this is also why sometimes, when films are made of novels, people get disappointed because they pictured the characters completely differently. Yes!
Dritan Kiçi
I see that your work is mainly focused on the moral and philosophical dilemmas of life. So, you invest a lot of internal thoughts into the characters—on what’s going wrong or right around them. Is it a kind of activist writing? And I want to focus a little bit on this because you are not just a writer with a good name and a lot of books; you’re also an activist. You speak about racism, ecology, and things that people worry about. So, do you see writing as a tool for your activism or your activism as a tool for your writing?
Annelies Verbeke
I don’t even know whether I see myself as an activist, but it is true that I have supported some causes, but most of the time, this is just because they are important to me and they have implications for my personal life. So yeah, I do have a feeling of justice and responsibility. This is true, but I never actually see my novels as a way of activism. I actually don’t think literature is meant to be a kind of activism. In any case, I mean you should not sit down writing a novel or a short story thinking: now I will teach people! I think this is not the way to do it. You just show what you see, how you see the world, or through a character’s philosophical thoughts. Indeed, it is just about what you see and what is true. And of course, I talk about racism in interviews, for example, because yes, I do have a Senegalese man in my life, and I learned a lot about racism and how it works because of that, because of my personal situation. So, it always has to do with life. I don’t think much about wanting to teach people what “this” is and what “that” is not.
Dritan Kiçi
I understand. Do you think that literature, the literary world in Europe, is in the right place? We see most of the books come from the United States. Do you think Europe is doing something wrong in your view?
Annelies Verbeke
Yes, absolutely! I wrote about this. I was a bit of an activist about “our” team. What we are probably doing wrong is focusing too much on writers from the United States. Of course, there are a lot of good writers, but I think we are not always aware of how influenced we are because of how the book market is set up.
Dritan Kiçi
…like with films, documentaries, and news, and everything else.
Annelies Verbeke
Yes, yes, absolutely! And actually, I was very surprised myself when, I think it was in 2016… Since 2005, I’ve noted everything down—what I write and read, and I wanted to check from which country I had read the most. And I found out (and I really didn’t think this would be the case), that at that moment, I had read more books from the United States than from Flanders or Europe. Yes! Which was shocking! When I was working as a writer in residence at the Free University in Amsterdam, I worked around this theme because it has strong implications. We are so English-language-minded, and of course, it is the lingua franca and comes in very handy. Even now we are talking in English, too, and… I do like reading in English, but for example, my stepchildren, they only read English. I mean, it’s what it is. I think it is incredible that we’ve evolved this far and… it’s not only them. It’s a whole generation.
Dritan Kiçi
Same with my kids.
Annelies Verbeke
Yes! I also know from my publisher that they almost don’t sell the translations from English anymore because everybody buys the original. Me too. I must confess. That’s… especially, since I noticed that I actually do read a lot from the United States, I changed it and I read even more European stuff, but not only European, also stuff from the rest of the world because the fact that the United States is so strong in books and literature has far-reaching implications. Their publishers decide what is to be translated. The publishers here often look at what is interesting for the United States, and then they translate it as well. And there are so many things to say about that. I tried with a long essay that I wrote about it to make people, at least, aware of the situation, because it is, it is a bit schizophrenic. On one hand, we have so many literary translators, and so many books are actually translated from all over the world to Dutch, which is great, which is absolutely great. The government has the literature fund… there is money for that, and we have very good policies on the literary translators. But on the other hand, it seems we neglect the fact that we are extremely influenced by the United States, and it is almost like a kind of “colonization.” The United States readers prefer a certain way of telling a story. A well-made play in theater or a novel with a clear beginning, middle, and ending. And there are so many different ways to write, so I think it might also make what is written a bit less varied, at least. So yeah, I mean, I can talk a lot about this subject because I think it’s important, yes.
Dritan Kiçi
I want to ask you something else that is important to me. The government in Belgium, and in Europe in general, sponsors the works of authors. Authors like Flemish authors, Walloon authors, and German-speaking authors. But the Arabic-speaking community in Belgium is now nearly six times bigger than the German-speaking community. So somehow, these authors who write in Arabic, or other languages, are not considered “Belgian literature.” I’ve spoken with so many people, and they say: “We are 7% of the population that speaks this language, and when it comes, for example, to art and painting, a painter of North African origin is a Belgian painter. An athlete is as Belgian as it comes, but when it comes to writing… you have to write in French, Dutch, or German…” To me, it is more important to tell the stories of Belgium than to speak one specific language of Belgium.
Annelies Verbeke
The German minority is very small in Belgium, and I actually don’t know any writers from them. Maybe this is my fault, but I don’t know any German-speaking Belgian writer. Anyway, yes, you are absolutely right about people, not only the Arabic-speaking community, but there are actually, especially in Brussels, so many spoken languages in which people write… in Antwerp too. I know quite a lot of writers who write in other languages, but I think this is the case everywhere in the world for people in the diaspora, they…
(interruption)
Dritan Kiçi
OK, so let’s pick up where we left off. I know this is a very difficult question to answer.
Annelies Verbeke
No, actually, it isn’t, because I met many people when I was working for PEN Flanders. I worked there for six years. It’s a while ago now, but then I met so many writers living in Belgium, writing in other languages. And I must admit that before that, I never actually questioned it or thought about it—that this must be the case. And then there seemed to be so many, and they indeed do have the feeling that we are completely unheard in this country, where we sometimes live for decades. And I also, for example, organized a literature day in a theater when I was the writer in residence at the University of Leuven two years ago. And then I invited all those people that I met throughout the years who write in different languages… who are often very famous in their countries of origin. It is also strange that we don’t know them. The organizers had never heard of them or never thought about the fact that writers not writing in Dutch or French are living here. So…
Dritan Kiçi
I can tell you from personal experience… My wife, my partner, has just published a collection of 36 short stories in Albanian, and more than half of them are set in Belgium.
Annelies Verbeke
Very interesting!
Dritan Kiçi
The characters speak Dutch and French, and they eat like the Flemish or the Walloons, they fight in the same way, they love in the same way… And somebody, and not just somebody, but so many readers, say that this book is not an Albanian book. Because it speaks about Belgium, about the customs of this country, the ways, the attitudes, and everything else. So the fact that it is written in Albanian is insignificant to me. The value of a book, written in a certain language, is not about which language it is written in; it’s about the story behind it.
Annelies Verbeke
That’s possible, and I think it is always the problem for diaspora writers in the first place to choose a language in which they will write. Will they write in the language that is their mother tongue, or will they write in the language of the host country that becomes their language because they live there? For example, one of my favorite writers is David Albahari, the Serbian writer who has been living in Canada for decades, and he always kept on writing in Serbian. And I remember going to one of his readings. He said that people in Serbia say: “Oh, you have this really old-fashioned use of words.” And he says, “Yeah, it’s just because my language development stopped at a certain point.” So yes, it’s interesting what it does to people. And there are many, many things to say about it. In the case of the Belgian literature fund, I think they now have, because of PEN, some kind of funding they can use for people not writing in Dutch, but it is also understandable that the fund is mainly for writers writing in Dutch because Dutch is also a very small language that needs support.
Dritan Kiçi
No, I’m not speaking about Flanders Literature. I’m not speaking about them because they have it in the name—Flanders Literature. I’m speaking about the European Union in general. When you go to the big names of the publishing industry, like the funds from Germany, Switzerland, or from the EU itself… Being an author like my wife, who lives in Belgium, she has to go to Albania to apply for any grants and funding. This is absurd. A painter who has come to Brussels just six months ago from Albania can go and apply for a grant here… and get it. But a writer? No! He or she has to go to his or her country… And this is, I think, the last border in our publishing industry. We need to merge. It is not important if you are… if you write this book in Italian, Albanian, or Flemish, as long as everybody can read it. That’s why I do insist in most of my work that it is good that we write in Albanian, in Dutch, and everything else. But it is also good that we translate our works into English.
Annelies Verbeke
Yes.
Dritan Kiçi
It is of so much importance. Because a writer cannot just stay at home and wait for some institution to give him or her some money so they can write a novel. We have so much to tell in Europe, and we don’t sell it. That’s to me, like… and I get mad at this, we have so much culture and color, and very little is showing on the world stage.
Annelies Verbeke
I understand what you are saying, but there are two sides to it. Because when we push the English translations even more, maybe… For example… I did not finish what I was saying about the time when I was the writer in residence at the Free University of Amsterdam. In that year, they canceled the study of Dutch literature because they said there were not a lot of people interested, which is…
Dritan Kiçi
What?! Why?
Annelies Verbeke
Because the whole university was more or less speaking English, so it was not interesting anymore to have it. So, you have those… quite extreme cases, which is not the case in Belgium. But yeah, there are two sides to it. Two of my books, one novel and one short story collection, are translated into English, and then yeah, of course, all of a sudden, you have a different reaction because now you can give them to your friends (who don’t speak Dutch).
Dritan Kiçi
Yes, that’s true.
Annelies Verbeke
From the rest of Europe, it’s the same; not everybody reads French either. It’s certainly true, and it also has some kind of status because when you have your work in English, it’s like you have achieved something. But I am also not very happy about it.
Dritan Kiçi
I crunched down the numbers about writing and books. You have nearly 2 billion people, native and non-native English speakers.
Annelies Verbeke
Yes, of course, this is a big number. And you also have English in schools everywhere too.
Dritan Kiçi
Now you can compare 4 million Albanians or 23 million Dutch speakers.
Annelies Verbeke
Of course. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. This is why we are…
Dritan Kiçi
My idea is that you should write in Dutch because it’s your language and it’s beautiful, but you get paid in English.
Annelies Verbeke
You mean everything should be translated into English?
Dritan Kiçi
We need to give these stories to the world, and English is spoken in China, in Japan, in India, in Russia, and everywhere. It is not about being jealous about the status of the language. It’s a fact of life, like death and taxes. There is no escape from it. In giving your books to the world, there is no point in staying in the garden around our church and singing Hallelujah. It’s not. It’s not going to help our books. Authors say that if you don’t get translated into English, nobody is going to read you in five years.
Annelies Verbeke
OK, let me ask you: how do we solve this? Should there be a European literature fund that translates every book into English?
Dritan Kiçi
That is a big question. I have had a bit of dealing with Traduki, which translates books from and to Southeast Europe. For the past 15 years, the books that have been sponsored and translated, at least from Albanian, are not reflective of the culture or success in that language. The authors are mainly insignificant. The books are, at best, mediocre. So the point is, if you leave the power of funding to a handful of people, it might be good in the first year, or the second, but then they make friends, and they have biases, and then it comes to a point where only a few authors get this benefit of the translation. I’m not speaking about you. I’m speaking about authors whose translated books have never sold one copy. Let me give you an example. Sleep! has sold 78,000 copies in Dutch. And you have to translate it because it is stupid not to, because this book has sold in its original. This is what I think should be done.
Annelies Verbeke
Not wanting to disagree, but it is also a kind of luck because when it comes down to sales, I don’t want to look at my other works like the things that sold best are the best books. For example, what I mentioned about the short story genre. I know it is better in Ireland, for example, or Turkey or Bulgaria, but here it is very difficult to sell short story collections, and actually, for four years, I have been advocating for the genre because it is not fair. It is a genre with tradition and with absolutely great writers. So if we only look at sales, the whole genre could just die.
Dritan Kiçi
You are right, but at some point, the book must sell. If it doesn’t, what’s the point in printing it?
Annelies Verbeke
I think, again, for example, I talk about short story collections since there is such a difference in where the short story collections are read a lot, and where they are not. It can be very useful to translate them, for example, to Turkish, and there they will probably have more sales than in other places.
Dritan Kiçi
OK, let me go back to the questions I know our readers will want to know. What is your technical process of writing? What do you do? Do you have a space that is yours, like a temple? Or do you write anywhere you like? What time of day? How long? How many pages?
Annelies Verbeke
Well, well, I can… I can show you my studio (moves the laptop camera around). The space where I am now is really, you could say, my temple.
Annelies Verbeke
I have had it for 10 years now, I think. It was just a shed in the back of my garden, a little nearly destroyed building that all the previous owners of this house had used just to store all the things they didn’t want. My partner said we should just try to work something out for me, so I could have my own “place.” So, he did most of the work himself, and I am now so happy with it. In the winter, it’s a bit difficult to get it heated enough, but…! But it’s nice because I look at the garden, and I have all the books that I have published here and everything else. It’s a bit of an archive as well. And everything here is made by somebody I know.
Dritan Kiçi
Oh, that’s nice!
Annelies Verbeke
Yes. It is really absolutely my place. I have had different ways of working, but nowadays, I tell myself: OK, I have to be at my desk at 9:00 at the latest. And then I work until I have two pages. Of course, there is always something else work-related that I have to do. Sometimes I have readings in the evening or an interview like now, or I have to prepare something before I have to leave the house, of course. But this—at least from 9 to, let’s say, 1—I am usually here at my desk.
Dritan Kiçi
And when do you edit? When do you go back to your text?
Annelies Verbeke
Edit? Oh, I am always rereading, and now, for example, I will reread and rework what I have written for this new novel, for which I am very insecure right now… And then I’ll send something to my editor for the first time. And then we’ll see from there.
Dritan Kiçi
Do you depend on your editor’s advice?
Annelies Verbeke
Not really, because I am quite stubborn. When he tells me to change things, I often don’t. But I completely trust him in the sense that he has worked with me from the very beginning, and he’s a very nice person, an intelligent person who understands me, because I think there should be some human and emotional understanding between people as well if you have to edit somebody’s work. So it is just your work, and it is not anything special when you are still creating. I don’t like to talk about it with anyone. I mean, you can tell people things about it, but they think: OK. Nice. So nice for you. So your editor is, in a way, the only person whom you trust; it’s his job, and he has knowledge about it. So he is about the only person I can talk to about it. But then I also have a good friend, who always reads something when I finish.
Dritan Kiçi
Just one beta reader?
Annelies Verbeke
I have now only one. For some previous books, I let more people read them, but I think you should also not have 20 opinions because, I mean, of course, they will be different from each other, and it will become confusing. So no, for a couple of years, it’s been my editor and this one friend who is like my first reader.
Dritan Kiçi
You have been translated into 22 languages…
Annelies Verbeke
I’m not sure…
Dritan Kiçi
Something like that. What is the best feedback you have gotten, and from which language?
Annelies Verbeke
I can immediately think about the funniest feedback that I had, which was from Finland. This one reviewer in Finland said… He is a very funny guy… He is an extreme, extreme fan of Hermann Hesse, and he puts every writer he writes about on a scale of how close they are to Hermann. Peter, the translator, said: “It seems that you have scored extremely high on the Hesse score!” That was the funniest. I never met the guy, but yeah, that was very funny. And then in Turkey, I think my first book was Sleep! It has been the most popular because I still see it passing on Instagram, or people are talking about it. So there it is. The book has its own life. And then I also had good reviews in the U.S. for 30 Days. And what I liked about that is that they appreciated the un-Americanness of it, which is close to what we were talking about before. So, of course, in the United States, some people like to read translations and would like to have more translations, but the U.S. market has only 3% of translated books.
Dritan Kiçi
Yes. And those translations are maybe from only 0.1% of the writers outside the U.S. There are amazing writers in Japan, but readers only know about six of them.
Annelies Verbeke
Well, I think I know more about Japanese writers thanks to Rik Van Hoeckel, who is a Flemish translator and knows Japanese very well. His wife is also Japanese. He lives actually close to me. He published this great anthology, introducing so many Japanese writers, and he’s always pushing to have different ones, and more are coming. And yeah, he really is doing a great job. I really admire good literary translators because they are the bridges between cultures. Absolutely fantastic.
Dritan Kiçi
OK, I think we answered everything I wanted to know, but I’m thinking for a second; I don’t want to slap myself later saying: “Why didn’t I ask this?”
Annelies Verbeke
Of course.
Dritan Kiçi
I wanted to ask you something else, but I forgot now, so let’s leave it for next time.
Annelies Verbeke
OK.
Dritan Kiçi
Thank you so much. We will, I hope, have a chance to have a coffee sometime and talk some more.
Annelies Verbeke
Sure, we can.