Illustrator and Children’s Book Writer Marit Törnqvist Wins Johannes Vermeer Award
The Johannes Vermeer Award 2024 goes to Swedish-Dutch illustrator and children’s book writer Marit Törnqvist. She receives the Dutch State Award for the Arts for her exceptional artistic ability to depict universal emotions in language and drawings, and to bring them close to the reader’s world of experience. Törnqvist takes home 100,000 euros.
The Johannes Vermeer Award is awarded for the first time to an artist who primarily focuses on children and young adults. The jury unanimously nominated Törnqvist. “Marit’s work breathes a free and open way of thinking, social compassion and a love for people of all ages. Seemingly simple, always recognisable and striking, sometimes longing, sometimes surreal, always beautiful.”
© Anne Reitsma
Minister of Culture, Eppo Bruins, who presented the award, added, “It is very valuable that for the first time, the award goes to an artist whose main focus is children. Marit’s illustrations and stories allow children and their parents to wander away into other worlds, with important and powerful lessons for real life. Her work adds to the rich children’s literature we have in our country.”
Oeuvre with highlights
Marit Törnqvist was born in 1964 in Uppsala, Sweden. She moved to the Netherlands at the age of five. She studied illustration at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Today, she is a celebrated illustrator and children’s book writer, and her oeuvre has many highlights. In 1995, Törnqvist made her debut as a writer with the book Small story about love, for which she was awarded a Silver Stylus. Since then, writing has become an increasingly important part of her work. For this, she has received the Silver Stylus twice in recent years, for The Happy Island (2018) and Turtle and I (2023).
Marit Törnqvist’s books have been translated into thirty languages.In 2017, she compiled an anthology of Dutch children’s literature translated into Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Somali, Tigrynia and Kurdish under the title A book for you, of which ten thousand copies were distributed in asylum seeker centres as a welcome gift to children in their own language.
Marit Törnqvist’s books have been translated into thirty languages. Törnqvist lives in the Netherlands and Sweden.
100,000 euros
The Johannes Vermeer Award is the Dutch State Prize for the Arts, established by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science in 2008. The prize is instituted to honour and encourage outstanding artistic talent and can be presented to artists from all artistic disciplines working and/or living in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The award consists of a sum of 100,000 euros intended for the realization of a special project within its own field of work.
The prize was previously presented to Tania Kross, Arnon Grunberg, Natasja Kensmil, Rineke Dijkstra, Ivo van Hove, Janine Jansen, Iris van Herpen, Steve McQueen, Michel van der Aa, Irma Boom, Rem Koolhaas, Marlene Dumas, Erwin Olaf (†), Alex van Warmerdam and Pierre Audi.
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