Staaltranen

Oscar Spaans received a grant to work on his debut novel Staaltranen. Staaltranen is about a Tata Steel employee suffering from chronic insomnia. The novel depicts an environment where love often turns out to be painful despite good intentions. Not only the relationships between the characters, but also the environment they live in is unhealthy. Yet the people who inhabit this world by no means let each other off the hook.

Oscar is a columnist and short-story writer. In 2014, he won the Volkskrant's Columnistenjacht twice and was subsequently a guest columnist for that newspaper. That same year, he wrote columns for the summer supplement of the Noordhollands Dagblad newspaper. His stories previously appeared in Revisor, Tirade and Kluger Hans, among others. In 2017, he won De Grote Lowlands Schrijfwedstrijd with his story Beestjes. He made his debut in 2019 with the short story collection Vacuüm.