Esther Jansma (1958-2025) was an eminent Dutch poet and archaeologist. Born in Amsterdam, she studied philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, obtaining her doctorate for research in dendrochronology. She worked for many years as an archaeologist with the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, founding the Centre for Dendrochronology in 1993, and was professor of dendrochronology at the Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University. In 2024 she was knighted for her work as a dendrochronologist (the equivalent of a British damehood), appointed a Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, partly for her research into the Dutch part of the Roman Limes, the border of the Roman Empire. She won several awards for her poetry, and read her work at many international festivals. In 2004 she took part in the Writing on the Wall project, a five-year international programme involving writers from the north of England, Scotland and countries which originally garrisoned Hadrian’s Wall. Francis R. Jones’s translation, What It Is: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), was the first in English of her work, drawing on all the collections she had published in the Netherlands at that time, and including poems inspired by parts of Hadrian’s Wall where Friesian and Schelt Auxiliaries were stationed.
