Fien Veldman is the 2021 recipient of the Joost Zwagerman Essay Award for her essay ‘Not really making it’, about growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Leeuwarden. In 2018 she won the Elise Mathilde Essay Award for her essay ‘Borders, doors and eyes open’. Hard Copy is her debut novel.
And no matter how much the tourists provoke me, with their wool beanies and vacant eyes, I know they just want to take pretty pictures. They’re in search of beauty. I get that. Who isn’t?
Aside from that, I would like to accept my life just as it is (or the way it was before I was put on leave), and present it exactly that way to other people, if they ask, without excuses or explanations.