David Colmer is an Australian writer and translator who lives in Amsterdam. He has won many prizes for his translations of Dutch literature, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker), and major Australian and Dutch awards for his body of work. His translations of the poetry of Hugo Claus and Ramsey Nasr were shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Popescu Prize respectively, and his translation of a selection of Annie M.G. Schmidt’s classic children’s poetry was specially commended by the Foundation for Dutch Literature. Recent poetry translations include Paul van Ostaijen’s modernist classic Occupied City (Smoekstack, 2016), Menno Wigman’s Window-cleaner Sees Paintings (2016), Ester Naomi Perquin's Hunger in Plain View (White Pine Press, Buffalo, 2017), and Simone Atangana Bekono's How the First Sparks Became Visible (The Emma Press, 2020); two translations for Deep Vellum/Phoneme in Dallas, Mustafa Stitou's Two Half Faces (2020) and Radna Fabias' Habitus; and two collections by Cees Nooteboom from Seagull Books, Monk's Eye (2018) and Leaving (2021). He has translated three collections by Flemish poet Charlotte Van den Broeck for Bloodaxe, the first two combined in Chameleon | Nachtroer (2019), and the third, The Inside of a Stone, forthcoming in 2025.
Author photo: Ronald Hoeben
