About Ruth Lasters
Poet Laureate of Belgium: from March 2026 to March 2028
Former City Poet of Antwerp 2022
Ruth Lasters (Antwerp, 1979) made her debut with the novel Poolijs/Polar Ice for which she received the Flemish Debut Prize 2007.
Her poetry debut Vouwplannen/Folding Plans was awarded the 2009 Debut Prize Het Liegend Konijn. Her second collection of poetry Lichtmeters/Light meters was published in 2015, for which she received the Herman De Coninck Prize and was nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize. Lichtmeters has meanwhile been translated into German (Lichtmesser, Parasitenpresse, Köln, Germany, translator: Stefan Wieczorek) and Spanish (Fotómetros, Viento de Fondo Argentina, Córdoba, translator:Micaela van Muylem).
Her third collection Tijgerbrood/Tiger Bread contains three separately awarded poems: Dek/Deck (Melopee Poetry Prize 2022), Abrikozen/Apricots (First Prize in the Poetry Competition of the Low Countries, 2022), and Losgeld/Ransom (Ark Prize of Free Speech 2023).
In March 2026, Désirs à l’essai/Trial Desires, the French translation of a compilation volume was published by Éditions Corlevour (Réginald Gaillard) in France, translated by Daniel Cunin.
Besides writing, Ruth Lasters is also a poet who performs at festivals such as Poetry International (Rotterdam, 2016 and 2023) or at the Flanders House in Londen (2024).
In September 2022, she returned her title as City Poet of Antwerp because the city council refused to publish a poem against educational discrimination. Lasters considered this offensive to the students from a technical school who she wrote it with. Her refusal to bend to the wishes of the establishment, which clearly wanted only promotional poetry, earned her the Ark Prize of Free Speech in 2023, as well as her new title ‘’Poet Laureate of Belgium” (from March 2026).
Ruth Lasters writes vivid, associative poetry on a wide range of themes, including pressing social issues. In her poems she searches for the ultimate reconciliation between classical poetry and modern poetry. She sees traditional poetry as a Caran d’Ache box with much-needed gray pencils, which she likes to complete with her own fluorescent pencils of modernity.
“Writing for me simply arose from an insane crush on words, on the mechanism of language. When they told me that the alphabet only has twenty-six letters, I became suspicious because my mother read to me whole books of Roald Dahl every night and those sentences just kept coming, strikingly different from each other. So, twenty-six letters, I thought it was one of those things they try to make you believe as a child. The alphabet, such an almost ridiculously meager tool that offers incredible combination possibilities. That challenges me every day. I totally fell for that.”
