She won the Constantijn Huygens Prize (2000) and the P. C. Hooft Award (2010) for her literary oeuvre.

Charlotte Jacoba Maria Mutsaers was born on 2 November 1942 in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

She was the daughter of the art historian Barend Mutsaers who worked at Utrecht University.

In the evenings she studied painting and printmaking at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

As a candidate politician she was on the list of the Party for Animals at the occasion of the Dutch elections for the House of Representatives in 2006.