Amsterdam-born and raised author Alma Mathijsen obtained a Bachelor Degree in ‘Image and Language’ at the acclaimed Gerrit Rietveld Academy and studied Creative Writing at Pratt Institute in New York. Writing essays for NRC Handelsblad, she taps into universal themes such as grief, feminism and (mis-)representation. As an author of six plays, a collection of short stories and three poetically charged novels, Alma’s thoughtful and immersive writing explores the thresholds between devotion and obsession; between self-sacrifice and egoism. In her latest fiction Vergeet de meisjes (Forget the Girls) a platonic love-affair surges onto the surface by way of rousing language – contriving a complex and tangled world where walls between the actual and non-actual become translucent and notions of gender are rendered obscure.