Nyk de Vries

Writer, musician, and performer Nyk de Vries moves fluidly between worlds: city and countryside, high and low culture, faith and doubt and perhaps most strikingly, between music and literature.

At Crossing Border he presents songs from his first solo album Hoeveel woorden (How Many Words). He will also perform excerpts from his latest novel De Baptisten (The Baptists), which NRC praised as “a delightful novel. (…) His protagonist Marten recalls the young Nick Cave, or Brecht in Baal, artists of the same storming intensity.”

De Vries began as a singer but has since established himself as a literary performer par excellence. With his suspenseful delivery, he draws audiences deep into his personal stories. Raised in a small village of farmers and laborers, he now lives with his family in gentrified Amsterdam East. In his work he seeks to bring together the contradictions that shape him.