Amsterdam · Fiction · Poetry

Stella
Jansen

Novelist · Poet · Storyteller

An Amsterdam-based novelist whose debut novel The Unforeseen traces the lives of three women across two continents and several decades — a story of adversity, windfall, and the grace of unexpected closure.

Read The Unforeseen About Stella

Featured Novel

The Unforeseen

A novel

This is the story of three women who have to deal with life in all its facets, adversities as well as windfalls and happiness whereby complications and unforeseen events shape their destiny in varying ways.Though faced with difficult situations these women cope in their own specific way with whatever life throws at...

Stella Jansen

Stella Jansen is an Amsterdam-based novelist and poet whose debut novel The Unforeseen was published in 2022. Her second novel, Facing the Music, is forthcoming.

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"Her writing has appeared in literary magazines across the United States, Canada, and England. In 1993 she won First Prize in the Bay Area Poetry Coalition."

Forthcoming

Facing the Music

A novel set on the island of Cyprus in the aftermath of the Turkish invasion, drawing on Stella's own remarkable experiences there.

From the Journal

Latest Thoughts

March 17, 2026

Baby To Be Born - by Stella Jansen

Baby to be born Like a flower are you or maybe like a bird sailing on the clouds. I feel sensations of fluttering wings of a butterfly. Your time is...

March 11, 2026

An ordinary train ride

An Ordinary Train Ride to Paris Some experiences in life stay with you forever—especially when they put you in mortal danger. In January of 1976, I went to Paris for a recording...

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