Quay Words presents: Eva Meijer: Sea Now in collaboration with Peirene Press
Schedule
Wed Dec 03 2025 at 06:30 pm to 07:30 pm
UTC+00:00Location
Exeter Custom House | Exeter, EN
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Join us in welcoming Eva Meijer to Exeter Custom House, as part of their UK-tour with publisher Peirene Press. Eva will be in conversation about the recent publication of the English translation of their book Sea Now.==
About Sea Now:
The country is flooding. Every day the sea claims another kilometre of land. The prime minister holds a daily press conference. Scientists try to find an explanation, without success. Sheep drown in the fields, weighed down by their waterlogged fleeces. The museums are emptied of their valuable works. Some people stay. Most leave. Once the evacuation is complete, and the rest of the world is already moving on, a climate activist, a young poet and an oceanographer voyage across the new sea. They are drawn back into the heart of a changed nation, seeking what they have lost in the deluge.
Review quotes:
"Sea Now joins Meijer’s rich oeuvre of novels and philosophical meditations on multispecies coexistence. One could read this novel as the story of two characters—the Netherlands and the sea—posing a question of each other: What am I? What and who is “the Netherlands”? What and who is “the sea”? The first question implicates uncomfortable stories of value: Who determines the status quo that decides who or what (a foreigner?, a painting?) deserves to be saved, who or what (a US-trained scientist?, the Dutch language?) would count as a loss?"
-Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Asymptote
"One of the unanticipated highlights of my reading year…a fabulist disaster novel, doubling as identity-of-the-nation commentary…playful, with a dry sly omniscient voice…a little bit as though Stephen Baxter’s Flood (2008) (or Japan Sinks) had been rewritten by Italo Calvino….the cumulative effect of this wide-ranging, generous narrative attention is a constant sense of motion, and a lightness of touch that allows Meijer to move smoothly from, say, haunting elegy to academic satire to a more serious intellectual point… Simply as a page-to-page reading experience, Sea Now is consistently fresh and interesting: You never quite know where its eye will fall next."
- Niall Harrison, Locus
===
About the Author:
Eva Meijer is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and singer- songwriter. Their fiction and non-fiction has been translated into over twenty languages. Since the publication of their first novel in 2011, their works have received numerous awards, including the Halewijnprijs honouring their oeuvre. Meijer’s books have been met enthusiastically by the Dutch but also international press including reviews in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and New York Review of Books.
Author photograph: Marcel Molle
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Where is it happening?
Exeter Custom House, Exeter, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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