Authors / Daan Borrel

Daan Borrel

Daan Borrel

(c) Maeve Stam

Daan Borrel (b. 1990) studied literature at the University of Amsterdam and then became a freelance journalist. She writes about culture and sexuality for dailies including NRC HandelsbladDe Corres-pondent and Het Parool. In 2017, along with family doctor and sexologist Peter Leusink, she compiled the collection This Is Not About SexSometimes Love is This is her debut.

Recent title – English material

Jaar van het nieuwe verhaal (The Year of the New Story), 2020

Soms is liefde dit (Sometimes Love Is This), 2018

Excerpt from "Sometimes Love Is This":

It felt like a real triumph, during those first few days, I remember. As if I had been able to segregate physical and mental conjunction. As if I had gained another life experience, had been able to fly home a more complete human being. Fly home to you. That you would get something from this as well, indirectly. I was under the honest impression that I had the right to find out what else, besides your lover, I was as a sexual, longing individual. A lover who had just moved in with her one and only, and to whom it was becoming oppressively clear which scenario was being charted in the process. Even though I don’t believe I saw this so clearly at the time. All I felt was the right to greater experience, something women of the world can allow themselves on holiday once or twice, only to pick up their quiet lives once back home again. In myself I saw someone who had taken the liberty to have another go at seducing someone. Testing whether I still had the knack, something like that. With hindsight, incredibly self-centred.