Marita de Sterck's Biography

All over the world folktales are told in which girls become women. Young heroines survive outside and inside lightning and thunder, earthquakes and floods,... In spite of bodily harms, jealous kin, animal suitors,... changing women emerge, alive and kicking, rooted in firm female flesh after their second birth in rituals and stories. For the last 25 years Marita de Sterck has recorded folktales in South-Africa (Sepedi and Griqua) the Amazon Forest, Navajo reservation, Trinidad, Surinam, Alentejo-Portugal, South-Algeria and in Congolese, Indian, Moroccan and Roumanian families in Belgium. She imported ancestral stories and ‘stories from afar’ in classrooms in the Low Countries and composed an anthology with 60 folktales from all over the world that could make a woman out of a girl: Bleeding Beauties. The book appeared in 2 editions: one for adults and one for youngsters from about 12 years on. Title and cover of the juvenile edition are more concrete but the inside is exactly the same. How cruel, aggressive and erotic some of the folktales are, not a single word was changed. Included are a great diversity of folktales that could promote growth in a methaphorical, subliminal, implicit way, leaving interpretations to the young adults. This intergenerational cross-cultural anthology invites grandmothers, mothers and daughters, and grandfathers, fathers and sons as well on a worldwide narrative expedition on womanhood. In her keynote lecture Marita de Sterck will invite you to fasten your seatbelt and come along. She will discuss the mixed blessings of retelling folktales on paper. Can there be a substitute for the unique experience of actually listening to a storyteller?


Marita de Sterck (°1955) studied languages and communication sciences at the University of Ghent and Anthropology at the University of Leuven. She teaches literature, children’s literature and anthropology at the school for librarians in Ghent. She has published picture books, fiction and non-fiction for children and young adult novels. There is a direct line between her research about initiation rituals and her recent novels for young adults: Bad Blood (Book Lion; Silver Kiss Award); The Dog Eaters (Golden Owl Public Award).
In 2009 she made a graphic novel out of an animal bridegroom story of the Ticuna Indians, Boto, and in 2010 she published her collection with 60 oral folktales that could make a woman out of a girl: Bleeding beauties.

Marita de Sterck
School for Librarians Ghent, Belgium
marita.de.sterck@telenet.be, users.telenet.be/marita.de.sterck
Telephone: 00 32 3 664 61 41.