Shifting between light and dark, awake and asleep, surreal and grounded, writer and poet Maarten van der Graaff won’t let you catch him. His poetry is interested in everything; as such, it beautifully captures the multitudes of modern life. Having studied arts and religion at Utrecht university, he effortlessly grasps the truth, which necessarily slips through his fingers, drifting away on a lukewarm breeze. His recent novel Onder asfalt (2023) tells a tale of angels descending upon earth, reaching through time and removing the motorways, plunging the urban body – now devoid of its infrastructural veins – into disconnected chaos. In 2012, Maarten co-founded the online literary magazine Samplekanon, which opposes ‘the overly stylized, overly beautiful, overly poetic’.