Wende Snijders was born in 1978 in Beckenham, England. At four she lived in Indonesia for a year, and from six to nine in Guinea Bissau, where she attended a French school. Thus French became the language she spoke as a child: she learned writing, thinking and making friends in a language that would become her second mother tongue. She grew up with classical music and felt the French chanson burning in her heart when, doing a workshop with theater director Ruut Weissman, she sang Edith Piaf's La Foule. "It felt as if I was burning, and that was all because I started to comprehend what it was like to communicate a text in a musical way." From that moment on the holy 'French' fire has continued to burn inside her. In 2000 Wende Snijders, during the Concours de la Chanson in the Amsterdam Kleine Komedie, won both the Jury and the Audience Prize and in 2002 she graduated from the Academie voor Kleinkunst. In the season 2004/2005 Snijders and her musicians performed a theatrical music show in sold out theaters. 2005 turned out to be an early harvest year: she won the Zonta Award, the prestigious British American Tobacco Prize (the former Pall Mall Export Prize) and her debut CD Quand Tu Dors was awarded an Edison Prize. Her latest CD La Fille Noyée was another blockbuster.
