Ruth Lasters

- Belgium -

Biography Ruth Lasters (Antwerp, 1979)

 

Current Poet Laureate of Belgium. Former City Poet of Antwerp (2022).
 

Made her debut with the novel Poolijs (Flemish Debut Prize 2007). She has published three morel novels since then.
 

Her poetry debut Folding Plans was awarded the 2009 Debut Prize Het Liegend Konijn. For her second collection of poetry Lichtmeters (2015) she received the Herman De Coninck Prize and was nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize. Her third collection Tiger Bread contains three separately awarded poems.
 

A compilation of her poetry collections was translated into French, German and Spanish.

  1. Désirs à l’essai, 2026, Éditions de Corlevour, Clichy, France, translator: Daniel Cunin.
  2. Lichtmesser, 2018, Parasitenpresse, Köln, Germany, translator: Stefan Wieczorek.
  3. Fotómetros, 2019, Viento de Fondo, Córdoba, Argentina, translator: Micaela van Muylem.
     

In April 2026 a wide poetry selection appeared in the Ukrainian magazine Raiduga, translated into Russian by Anastasiya Andreeva.
 

In September 2022, Lasters returned her title as City Poet of Antwerp because the city council refused to publish a poem against educational discrimination. She found this so offensive to the students from a technical school with whom she had written it. This resignation earned her the Ark Prize of Free Speech (2023).
 

https://ruthlasters.com/en/
https://dichter.esvanbelgie.be/


Ruth Lasters often allows herself to be inspired in her work by everyday life. Her language is clear and her tone in perspective. Still, she doesn’t resign herself to that reality in her poetry. In her confrontation with the world, she issues a call for it to change: ‘For every human, a room should somewhere grow / a single millimetre of new space // as interest for each precious moment gone’. She translates that call into her poetry through the use of neologisms, unexpected grammatical constructions, omissions where you would expect words. However, the poetry of Ruth Lasters is in no way pedantic and is not engaged in the traditional sense of the word; rather she views the world like a curious child who marvels at what it sees and wonders whether it can do something itself to somehow change it.

In her poems, Ruth Lasters focuses not only on that big, changing world. Just as often, ‘I’ and ‘you’ and how difficult the relationship between the two of them can be, forms the subject of her poems. Just as with her more socially oriented poems, in the relational poems, Lasters battles against the unwanted situations in which the ‘I’ is sometimes found: ‘If moving on seems impossible, then choose one single / onward move, one glorious // obstinacy.’