Peter Verdonk is Emeritus Professor of Stylistics at the University of Amsterdam, where he started teaching in the early 1970s, after a career in maritime law. His main interests lie in rhetoric, literary criticism, discourse analysis, narratology and cognitive poetics.
His books include Twentieth-century Poetry (Routledge 1993), Literature and the New Interdisciplinarity (with Roger D. Sell, Rodopi 1994), Twentieth-century Fiction (with Jean Jacques Weber, Routledge 1995), and Exploring the Language of Drama (with Jonathan Culpeper and Mick Short, Routledge 1998). His most recent book is Stylistics in the Oxford Introductions to Language Study series (Oxford University Press 2002).
He is a member of the editorial board of Language and Literature (Sage) and co-editor (with Gerard Steen en Willie van Peer) of the book series Linguistic Approaches to Literature (Benjamins). He is an honorary member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA).
On his retirement, Peter Verdonk was honoured with a festschrift entitled Contextualized Stylistics, edited by Tony Bex, Michael Burke and Peter Stockwell (Rodopi 2000).