Mary Shelley and the Birth of Frankenstein
Interview conducted by Clare O’Dea, journalist and author
Born in 1981 in Hilversum, Anne Eekhout is an award-winning Dutch novelist. In 2014, she published her debut novel Dogma, which was nominated for the Bronze Owl for best Dutch-language debut novel and was longlisted for the AKO Literature Prize. This was followed in 2016 by her second novel Op een nacht (One Night), which earned Anne Eekhout a nomination for the BNG Bank Literature Prize. In 2019, Nicolas and the Disappearance of the World, her third novel, was awarded the Youth Literature Prize 2020. In 2021, her fourth novel, Mary or the Birth of Frankenstein (Pushkin Press, 2023 / Mary, Gallimard, 2023) was inspired by the teenage years of Mary Shelley, a flamboyant young girl who interweaves the experience of love and loss and surrenders herself to the dizzying powers of the imagination on the shores of Lake Geneva in the company of the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Her book is an imaginative exploration of the great writer’s psyche and an unsettling meditation on the monsters that inhabit our minds. It’s the first of Anne Eekhout’s novels to be published in English and is also currently being translated into 14 languages.