My name is Tuur Verheyde. This is my official website.
I am a twenty-six year old Belgian writer & poet.
What is this site?
This site is where you can find out about my publications, my opinions and so on.
This 'About' page is just a brief introduction to who I am, what I write and what you can find on this site.
The 'Blog' page is the place for all my personal writing. On it, you'll mainly find opinion pieces, essays and poetry.
The 'Work' page contains an overview of every poem, essay, chapbook, pamphlet and book I have ever published, separated by format/medium, from new to old. It lists material that you can find on the blog and and that was published in magazines, websites, anthologies and elsewhere. I try to include working links as much as possible. If a poem appeared only in print or on a now defunct website and you want to read it, just DM me on one of the social media platforms that are linked on the top and the bottom of this page and I'll see what I can do.
The 'Solidarity' page is compilation of useful links, resources and PDFs
for furthering the causes of international solidarity, women's rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, climate justice, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, worker's rights, anti-fascism and general anti-capitalism. If you have anything that might be helpful to add to the page Just let me know by hopping into my DMs on the social media platforms that are linked at the top and the bottom.
What is my work?
My work has changed much over the years. I started out just wanting to write about myself and my problems without much attention to style and form. Much has changed since then. Nowadays, I try to instill my poetry with the stylistic qualities that made me love the form: An attention to euphony, a fluent yet distinctly poetic style, a meaningful use of line-breaks, a tone that can be playful, serious, confessional or ponderous and more. Content-wise my poetry is mainly centred around current events, progressive politics, spirituality, highbrow and popular culture as well as personal experiences and stories. While the plain confessional roots are still sometimes present, I do want to enrich my work with the variety and ambiguity that remains central to life and those who live it. Sometimes, I write deliberately straightforward political poems. More often than not, I try to accurately represent how someone enmeshed in global politics and pop culture experiences life, mixing the personal, the anecdotal, the political, the absurd, the spiritual and so forth.
My non-fiction work mostly consists of rants, opinion pieces and essays about my views, my experiences and the general state of the world. However, I do occasionally write media reviews, literary analyses as well.
Who am I?
I was born and raised in Ieper/Ypres (the one from the First World War) in West-Flanders, Belgium. My mother tongue is Dutch (and/or West-Flemish). At a young age, I came into contact with British, American, Australian and Canadian media (Films, Television Series and Video Games) and gradually taught myself English to better understand and engage with these forms of art and entertainment. Soon, YouTube came to the fore and my capability and knowledge of the English Language grew through a near constant engagement with video-essays, debates, reviews and similar stuff. Then things changed; I had always been an introverted, dreamy kid and the sudden shift in attitudes from childhood to teenage years did not agree with me. Soon I started to have serious self-esteem issues that spiralled out into much darker places as the years went on.
When I was about 13, I found my lifeline in English poetry and literature. Dutch literature and poetry had never agreed with me; perhaps because of the scorn that was (and still is) directed at the West-Flemish accent and dialect due to certain mainstream conceptions of what Dutch literary language should be; perhaps because of the stiff, po-faced style that seemed to me to dominate most mainstream Dutch literary works. I do not know. What I do know is that English was the language of the popular culture that had most impacted me. The English literary language with which I first came into contact simply sounded natural, elegant and did not seem to have to put on airs of condescension and pretension to discuss the complex and the profound. Due to the writings of Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf, English also became the language of the writers who most spoke to me, the people who seemed to have shared much of my darkest emotions and impulses. All of that got me to start writing poetry and non-fiction exclusively in English.
I began writing poetry when I was about 13 going on 14. During my first years I struggled with the fact that I felt the need to primarily express myself in a second language. It felt silly and arrogant to write in any language other than my mother tongue. However, writing in Dutch felt hollow, insincere and unfulfilling. Most of my writing from those first years is now lost as I threw almost all of it away at the time. I felt ashamed of writing poetry and felt like a pretentious impostor claiming a language that was not his own. With time I learned to let go of these misgivings and became more confident in my writing. I stopped erasing it, but still hid my passion from my friends and family for quite a while. Ultimately my family and friends found out and the need for secrecy fell away. I began to publish openly on social media and also moved to writing rants/opinion pieces in English. In 2016, during my first year at university, I submitted a poem to a student magazine for the first time. In 2018, I did my first submissions to Anglophone magazines outside of my own country. I developed my writing style and gradually found a voice and poetics that suited me. I graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Ghent in September 2020 with a Master's degree in English Linguistics and Literature. I also have a Bachelor's degree in Latin Linguistics and Literature. I currently still live in Ypres and am working on my first larger work of fiction and my first poetry collections.
For More Info
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