Charlotte Mutsaers is a writer and painter, but also an animal lover and forever young. She received the P.C.Hooft prize in 2010 for her oeuvre. She lives in Amsterdam, Ostend and France and last October published her latest book: Harness of Hansaplast.

Mutsaers studied Dutch and taught at a high school, whilst studying drawing and painting at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the evenings. After graduating she started working at the same academy as a painting teacher. Altogether she has taught for more than 10 years. Besides her work as an artist, she makes paintings, designs stamps and posters and has designed many book covers, she started writing around the age of forty.

Her most recent book Harnas van Hansaplast is based on her brother Barend and is a story about an intelligent, socially awkward man, a hermit. After his death, his two sisters visit the parental home in Utrecht where he lived and encounter a huge mess and a landlord who wants to strip, divide and sell the house as quickly as possible. Room by room they clean everything out and along the way encounter all kinds of collections, such as notes on the daily (takeaway) meal, but also a large amount of porn, including child pornography. After publication, a discussion arose as to what extent the events in this book are real. But as Mutsaerts stated, the book is fiction, and it is not up to her to indicate what did and did not really happened. ‘A primitive spirit would call that lying, I call it being true to the book’.