Onno Kosters is an Associate Professor of English literature and Translation Studies at Utrecht University. His teaching and research fields are English and Anglo-Irish literature 1700-present (with specific attention to James Joyce and Smauel Beckett) and Translation Studies. His doctoral dissertation on James Joyce (Ending in Progress: Final Sections in James Joyce’s Prose Fictions) was published in 1999. He has published widely on Joyce, Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Weldon Kees, and many others. Kosters is a published poet, and a translator of prose and poetry into Dutch, among others of Samuel Beckett (Watt), Seamus Heaney (District and Circle), Patti Smith (A New Jerusalem), and Ocean Vuong (Time is a Mother). He is currently working on a retranslation of The Waste Land into Dutch.

Kosters guest-edited volume 14.1 (2015) of Hypermedia Joyce Studies, dedicated to Joyce's poetry. He is a member of the editorial board of European Joyce Studies, and a trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. He was the director of “a long the krommerun: XXIV International James Joyce Symposium, Utrecht, June 2014”, and editor, with Tim Conley and Peter de Voogd, of the selected papers of the Symposium (Brill Publications, 2016, no. 24 in the European Joyce Studies series).

Creative work

To date, Kosters has published five collections of poetry; selections from his creative work have been translated into English, German and French (for more information, see www.doelverdediger.nl). In 2013 he was awarded the annual Turing Poetry Award.

Kosters’ translation into Dutch of Beckett’s novel Watt was published in 2006 and awarded the annual Filter Translation Award. His translation (with Han van der Vegt) of Heaney’s penultimate collection District and Circle was published in 2013 (Meulenhoff publishers); Kosters’ and Van der Vegt’s translation of Adam Foulds’s The Broken Word was published in 2014. His translation of Patti Smith's The New Jerusalem was published in 2018; his translation of Ocean Vuong's collection Time is a Mother was published in April 2022.