Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923?2014) was a towering figure in modern Dutch poetry. In the words of a 2009 prize jury, Kouwenaar 'has long been generally regarded as our greatest (living) poet'. His work spans six decades and 25 published collections of poetry. These gained him the Low Countries' top literary awards, and influenced generations of younger poets. Kouwenaar was born and died in Amsterdam, though his second home in southern France forms a backdrop to many of his poems. Kouwenaar's poems have featured in many English-language anthologies and journals, and in a translation of his 2002 collection totally white room which is out of print. Francis R. Jones's edition, about time: selected poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2027), is the first book-length selection of this European master poet's work in English. Michele Hutchison's translation of his classic wartime coming-of-age debut novel, Fall, Bomb, Fall (1950) was published by Pushkin Press in 2025.

Francis R. Jones was born in Yorkshire in 1955. He studied languages, literature and linguistics at the universities of Cambridge, Sarajevo, Reading and Newcastle. He is Emeritus Professor of Translation Studies at Newcastle University, and lives in Northumberland. Jones's translations have won no fewer than 15 prizes. These include the prestigious European Poetry Translation Prize twice, for his versions of Ivan V. Lalic. And his translation oeuvre from Dutch gained him the 2005 inaugural James Brockway Prize for the Translation of Dutch Poetry. His translation of The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2026.