Thanks for taking an interest in my work. Please click on the book covers below for more information and reviews. The central column features my latest blogs and recent updates, mostly in English and sometimes in Dutch.
For contact details and my biography (in English and Dutch) please visit the About page.
21/11/24
To mark what would have been my father’s 105th birthday, I recently posted a photo of one of my most prized possessions: a cupboard door off my parent’s sideboard, which emigrated from the Netherlands to South Africa and back. The door is decorated with hotel stickers from my father’s travels to dozens of countries, including several behind the Iron Curtain, in the Cold War years.
More...19/5/21
Dit verhaal verscheen eerder in een bundel ter viering van Guus Bauers 60ste verjaardag, waarin schrijvers op uitnodiging van David de Poel vertelden over hun meest miserabele bijbaantjes.
More...19/5/21
A series of letters to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Paris Review, Playgirl, The New Yorker, Granta Magazine, Oprah Winfrey, the Nobel Prize and the Prime Minister of Canada, pre-emptively rejecting their offers to exploit my literary assets.
More...19/5/21
‘Het is makkelijk praten vanuit de helikopter,’ tweette ik gisteren aan een vriendin, toen ze haar bezorgdheid uitsprak over het protest op de Dam, waar mijn jongste dochter aan meedeed. Ze is negentien maar gaat inmiddels al aardig wat jaartjes haar eigen gang in Amsterdam.
More...18/11/22
Mijn moeder zou vandaag 99 zijn geworden. Altijd als ik gesoigneerde fascisten op de kanalen zie moet ik aan haar denken. Vooral aan het oorlogstrauma dat ervoor gezorgd heeft dat ook ik weet dat iedereen een stem mag hebben, zelfs als daar uitsluitend haat mee wordt gezaaid...
More...10/12/17
Neznosna radost – Unbearable Joy – is the beautiful Slovenian title of a story from my latest novel Van Kleine Helden (All The Little Heroes), which was recently published in the leading Slovenian literary magazine Literatura.
More...19/5/21
A poem about love composed of selected #walk tweets about rain.
More...11/10/23
In early 1943, the German occupying forces tightened restrictions on telephone traffic. Travel by train was dangerous due to attacks by Allied warplanes, so my grandparents and aunt began writing letters to mother, who was then 20 and working as a trainee nurse at a psychiatric institution for women and girls, located out in the countryside about 100 kilometres from home in Amsterdam. After my mother's death, I read the 25 letters she had kept for the first time. My grandmother died in 1947, so these letters are my only connection with her.
More...11/10/23
As temperatures drop, Dutch people become increasingly excited about strapping razor-sharp knives to their feet and getting in each other's way on a stupidly slippery surface. That means it's time to share some ficts about this great Dutch tradition.
More...11/10/23
In the summer of 1942, a Jewish haberdasher from the Dutch town of Zwolle sought refuge in the Trophy Room of Zwaluwenburg Manor, which was then a psychiatric institution for women and girls. Michel Leo (Max) Hes meticulously recorded the mounting tension in his journal.
More...