J. Slauerhoff is one of the greatest Dutch poets of the twentieth century. He owes the unique position he occupies in Dutch literature to completely personal themes he carved out in equally personal poetry. Longing for the passionate love for a woman, struck by the tragedy of loneliness, the yearning to be elsewhere or somewhere in the past, the desire for the sea, the disenchantment with present-day life, the awareness of degeneration, all these themes mark him as a late Romantic poet. On the other hand, the rawness and acrimony of his tone, as well as his split personality, make him a true exponent of his era. In the guise of consistently different characters, either historical or fictive, Slauerhoff aligns with the modernist tradition of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Pessoa.

Paul Vincent is one of the most renowned translators of Dutch literature for the past twenty years. His work is internationally recognized and he has won quite a few major awards. He was the recipient of the first David Reid Poetry Translation Prize for this translation of Hendrik Marsman’s famous poem Herinnering aan Holland (Memory of Holland) in 2006, awarded by the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature. In 2012 Paul Vincent received the Vondel Prize for My Little War his translation of Mijn kleine oorlog by Louis Paul Boon. In September 2015 Holland Park Press published 100 Dutch-Language Poems — From the Medieval Period to the Present Day, selected and translated by Paul Vincent and John Irons, resulting in the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize.

For 22 years Vincent taught Dutch language and literature, including translation, at Bedford College and later at University College London (UCL), before taking the plunge into freelance translation in 1989. His career spanned many decades, in which he translated many great works of literature, poetry and non-fiction, having retired from translation at the age of 81.