Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (1968) is a poet, novelist, essayist, critic and polemicist. He writes in Dutch. He made his poetic debut in 1998 with Van de vierkante man (Of the Square Man), which won him the 1999 C. Buddingh’ poetry prize for best first collection and a nomination for the 1999 VSB poetry prize and the 2000 edition of the quinqennial Paul Snoek poetry prize. In 2000 he published De Antieken, een korte literatuurgeschiedenis (A Short History of Classical Literature). His second collection of poems, Het glimpen van de welkwiek (The Glimpsing of the Witherwing 2001), was nominated for the 2003 J.C. Bloem poetry prize and the 2003 Hugues C. Pernath poetry prize. In 2002 he published the volets of his Steppoli Tetralogy: the novel Rupert, A Confession, and the poetry collection Dolores, Elegies. The prose debut was awarded the 2002 Anton Wachter prize. He is the only Dutch author to have won both major debut prizes: for poetry as well as for prose. Rupert also won him the Belgian Gerard Walschap prize for literature and a nomination for the 2003 Debutantenprijs. In 2002 in Düsseldorf he was awarded Literaturpreis Nordrhein-Westfalen for his lyric oeuvre. In 2003 he published Het geheim van het vermoorde geneuzel (The Secret of the Murdered Mumbling), a collection of essays on poetry in which he explains his poetics. In 2004 he published his second novel, Het grote baggerboek (The Bumper Book of Sludge), that was shortlisted for the prestigious AKO Literature Prize as well as for the major Belgian literature prize, the Golden Owl. This book also won him the 2005 Tzum Prize for the best sentence in a fictional work. In 2005 he published his fourth collection of poems, In de naam van de hond, de grote gedichten (In the Name of the Dog, the Grand Poems). His third novel, Het ware leven, een roman (True Life, A Novel), is due to appear in 2006. All his books are published by De Arbeiderspers. He is a literary critic of the national Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, columnist of the Belgian monthly Deng, editor of the literary journal De Revisor and founder and editor of the poetry journal Awater.
From 1992 until 2002 Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer worked as a researcher and teacher of Ancient Greek at the Leiden University Classics Department and as a visiting research fellow at Royal Holloway University of London. In 1996 he obtained his doctorate with his dissertation Three Aeginetan Odes of Pindar. A Commentary on Nemean V, Neman III & Pythian VIII, published by Brill in 1999 (as Mnemosyne Supplement 197). He also published the books First Person Futures in Pindar (Hermes Einzelschriften Heft 81, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), One Hundred Years of Bacchylides: Proceedings of a Colloquium Held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Amsterdam, VU Press 1999, together with S.L. Slings), The Manipulative Mode. Political Propaganda in Antiquity: A Collection of Case Studies (Mnemosyne Supplement 261, Leiden, Brill, 2005, together with Karl A.E. Enenkel), as well as a dozen of articles on Pindar, Bacchylides, Sappho and Anacreon. (www.iljapfeijffer.nl)