Sinds een maand zit Annemieke in HAVO 3. Sinds een maand is ze stapelmesjokke verliefd. Op Rob. Maar Rob heeft al een vriendin en is gek op meisjes. Op wel heel veel meisjes. Annemieke gaat door diepe dalen, maar bevindt zich ook regelmatig in de zevende hemel. Haar vriendinnen leven mee…of werken tegen. Kortom: een echte soap.
Claudia van der Sluis (Amsterdam, 1963) grew up in a middle-class family. Her parents owned a small restaurant in the center of Amsterdam in the 1970s. She describes her childhood as carefree and happy, with two loving parents and a younger brother, Paul. “The sky was the limit in our home,” she says about that time. “We were terribly spoiled. It was important to enjoy life in addition to working hard, our parents encouraged us to make our dreams come true."
She credits her free childhood for the fact that her career took an erratic and fascinating course. After high school she worked at the PTT (now KPN) in Amsterdam and attended the cooking school on the Elandsgracht in Amsterdam. She was twenty-four when her son Alessandro was born (1987), whom she raised alone for the most part.
Claudia started writing because as a young mother it was almost impossible to work as a chef. She took her first steps as a writer through a vacancy in the newspaper: novels for Favoriet publishers. She had a lot of fun making up the plots. "I don't know how many I wrote then, but there were definitely more than 30 publications in the five years I did it. I made up a plot by making mood boards for which I cut pictures from magazines. Then my imagination just took off get on with it."
Because she wanted to write for children, Claudia started an education at Script+ in Amsterdam. Her first children's book was published in 1996 by Sjaloom Publishers: 'Mijn vader is een wolkenman', which was translated into German as 'Mein Vater ist ein Wokenmann', quickly followed by the young adult novel 'Zeep! Almost at the same time, Tirion published her hobby book, a little book about creative treats for children: 'Hoera, ik mag trakteren'.
In 1997 she got a job as an editor at the magazine Vriendin and put writing books aside for a while. "My life was a mundane madhouse. I traveled through the Netherlands, sometimes had ten pages in a week to work on and took care of my son. Then there were the press trips abroad and many, many press events such as wine tastings and dinners as well as culinary editor. It was a great time."
In 2001 Claudia started writing for a completely different genre, non fiction spiritual books for publisher Schors: Moderne Heksen. "Not a strange choice for me to write about spiritual subjects, because I have been practicing the Tarot since I was twenty and interpreting dreams for as long as I can remember, later even for various magazines. I immersed myself in astrology, which I also learned from home, my father practiced astrology and the tarot and my mother, like all of us in the family, was very sensitive and spiritually developed." In 2002 Het grote boek van de maan (Das Magische Buch vom Mond) was released, followed by De vier elementen (Die Reihe der Vier Elemente) in 2003, immediately translated into German. Moderne Heksen (Alte Traditionen, Moderne Hexen) sold over 40,000 copies.
In 2000 she started an IT company together with her partner at the time Jurgen and taught Claudia web design, but she also continued to work as an interviewer and writer. She interviewed many celebrities such as Marlies Dekkers (fashion designer), Tom Egbers (football commentator) and Herman Pleij. After her divorce in 2007, she moved to Sicily to live and work. She wrote her books Kogelvis and Gestalkt based on the popular television series Flikken Maastricht for the publishing house Karakter Uitgevers. The books were released in 2008, as well as her latest hobby books 'Lariats' and 'Lange halskettingen', again with publisher Tirion. When she came back from Sicily in 2008 she mainly focused on 3-d design and web design. In 2018 she retired from web design as a professional job and since then she has been working full time on her novel which is expected to be published in 2024. She is always writing, in every possible way. Claudia lives in Almere with her husband Ron whom she married in 2019 and her Staffordshire dog Xena. In 2021 sh