Bette Adriaanse (born in Amsterdam in 1984) is a writer and a visual artist. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and an MSt in Creative Writing from Oxford University. She works in different media, across different genres: she writes stories and makes wall-sized drawings, installations and video-work.
Bette’s literary work has appeared in magazines for literature, art and philosophy, in the UK and the Netherlands, and she regularly exhibits her visual work.
She has just finished her first novel, Rus.
Extract from Rus
It is strange, the secretary thought as she looked at the clock above the glass corridor, that the ticking of the clock doesn’t really have anything to do with time. The hands are pushed forward by batteries, not by time. Although, if time slowed down, the clocks would slow down too of course, because time determines the speed in which everything goes forward. She studied her hands as she slowly moved them before her eyes. The people who walked down the corridor were laughing and joking. The secretary pictured herself laughing and joking in her dress.
‘She is great,’ people would say to each other, and then someone would ask her out to a restaurant and they would be inseparable ever since and if this person had to pick one person to be on an island with, it would be her, without a doubt and the other way around.’
Extract from Rus, a novel about dreams and loneliness in a modern metropolis. 2012
By Bette Adriaanse
Copyright of the material on this page remains with the author.
Jenny Lewis 