AmazeTheWorld is actually nothing more than a brainfart by Frank Robben, born from a discussion he had long ago with Jan van Hout. In 2016, this figment of imaginatie took shape as a website. And the website became the backbone of a non-existent publisher. This allowed Frank to keep up the appearance that his writings were published by a real publisher. The joke soon became too much work to maintain. Since it was never intended as a professional site, the whole thing was simplified and Frank decided to extend the subject to all literary and artistic activities of his family.
Frank Robben
I had been writing for years. Poems, short stories. scripts, novels. Most of it never got finished, or disappeared prematurely in a trash can. The things I was satisfied with ended up in an archive that was only visited by myself. After having played in the amateur theater for several years, and having experimented with writing and directing plays, I wanted to release parts of my archives on the world.
Laura Robben
With a father like mine, it was nearly impossible that I didn’t start to dabble with the arts. I didn’t just find a hobby, I found myself. What started with just a few words aon a scrap of paper quickly assumed form of endless documents with scentences which make sense or simply don’t make sense. The written word (it could be in a poem, short story or a book), I’m immediatly sold. Theatre started to run trough my veins and the stage became a third home for me When I lastly also found the nice things in the world through the lense of my camera, i found out who I was. I’m Laura the actrice, Laura the photographer and LMR the author.
Gwen Robben
Gwen has fewer writing ambitions. Just like Laura and Celeste, she played in a few youths plays. In addition, she expresses her artistic ambitions as a saxophonist in Harmonie de Arend.
Celeste Robben
Celeste (some may remember her as Alex) prefers to keep her writings to herself for now. And so we will have to wait for her first masterpiece. She showed her acting talent a couple of times in youth plays and in the comedy ‘de Fromavachecremes’. Musically, she’s the quiet, but not silent percussionist of Harmonie de Arend.
Publishing
books
Frank tried to sell his (dutch) manuscripts Faits-Divers and Talisker to the established publishing houses in Belgium and the Netherlands. He can now decorate his room with prints of the standard rejection emails. The phrase ‘unfortunately your manuscript is not eligible for publication at our publisher because it does not fit in our fund‘ roars through his head on lonely winter evenings as a wailing nightmare.
You could say that he is a very bad writer, or that his books are non-commercial. But Frank is stupid and prefers to hit his head against different walls before he throws the towel into the ring. So he came up with the cheapest alternative for a real publisher. You can now find some books and collections of poetry between the other junk on Apple’s BookStore, Amazon, Google Play and Barnes&Noble. Paper sniffers and electronics-disbelievers can indulge in the paperback that you can order via Amazon.
The first english publications (Talisker & Abrupt) are translations of his dutch novel & short story rsp. More English publishings may follow, but keep in mind that Frank is a busy person and lazy writer. So this may take a while.
Laura wrote several short novels and story / poetry collections in Dutch. She published her first novel (in Dutch): A guy, a girl, another girl, the river and a ghost (terwijl ik op je wacht).
Plays
Frank’s plays are only available in dutch. The first ones (‘The king is dead’ and ‘The woman of Philips Newman’) can be found in the catalog of SABAM.
Since 2018 Frank is connected to Toneelfonds J. Janssens as a playwright. You can contact them for ‘Talisker’ and ‘President Foo’ in their fund. Hopefully the theater associations will find their way to Frank’s pieces through them.
contact Amaze The World? Click here.