Toon Tellegen was born in 1941 on one of the islands in the south-west of the Netherlands. He is one of the best-known Dutch writers, with a long list of awards to his name. In 2007 he received two major prizes for his entire oeuvre. He considers himself in the first place a poet and has published more than twenty collections of poetry to date, but he is also a novelist and a prolific and popular children’s author. Toon Tellegen lives in Amsterdam with his wife, and worked as a GP until his recent retirement. He gives frequent readings of his work, often with musical accompaniment; in 2009 he read the whole of Raafvogels (‘Raptors’) at the Perdu theatre in Amsterdam.

In November 2011, Raptors was awarded the Popescu Prize for poetry translated from a European language into English. The judges said: 'His [Tellegen's] complex, often surreal and always highly affecting poems exhibit an understanding of the power of the story in which the dream-like psychology, the marvellously nuanced telling of a family's malaise set him apart as an entirely distinctive voice in European poetry.'