Veerle Ackerstaff has always believed in the power of stories. As a toddler she could sit for hours in front of an old LP player to listen to fairy tales and soon she dreamed of worlds far beyond the Dutch border. At the age of eighteen she left for China. At the foot of the Himalayas she met her husband and was taken in by his hill tribe, the Nuosu. In China she wrote her first fiction novel for young adults: The Fire of Dawn and in the ten years she has lived there, she has been the owner of two language schools and a columnist for the magazine Jij & Je Kinder. Her second book, The Dharma Prophecy, is due for release in the UK.
Veerle now lives in the Netherlands and has completed both the English-taught Master's degree in Professional Writing (Magna Cum Laude with a major in fiction and screenwriting) and the Fiction Directing course at the Amsterdam Film School, resulting in her award-winning short film TROEBEL. Since 2020, she is the director of Break Free Film and is developing and producing various fiction film projects.