Meet UCL Dutch Writer in Residence 2024-25: Raoul de Jong

UCL Dutch is delighted to welcome 2024-25 writer in residence Raoul de Jong, a prolific and awarded Dutch writer of fiction, non-fiction, scripts and plays.

For many years now, Dutch Studies has been hosting a literary translation project, in which the writer in residence collaborates with our final year students to produce a literary translation to be published on a Low Countries or international literary platform or publication. The writer-in-residence also partakes in one or two literature classes.

This year’s guest is Raoul de Jong. Born in Rotterdam (1984), he published his first book at the age of twenty-one, Het leven is verschrikkulluk! (Life Is Terribbelle; 2005), in which he recounts the year after he finished secondary school. Since then, he has published eight books, many of which are travel accounts: he travelled to West-Africa on his nineteenth to visit different aid projects in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Later he survived New York for four months with only $50 in his pocket, and he walked all the way from Rotterdam to Marseille. He further regularly publishes columns and other writings in Dutch newspapers and magazines. 

In 2020, De Jong published Jaguarman, a literary autobiographical tale in which he recounts meeting his Surinamese father for the first time at the age of 28 and travelling, in the wake of that meeting, to Suriname to get to know this part of his background – his own heritage but also the history of the country and how it is intertwined with the colonial history of the Netherlands. The book was nominated for the Libris Literary Prize 2021, the European Union Prize for Literature 2021 and the Boon Literary Prize 2022, and strengthened De Jong’s reputation as an important literary voice in the Low Countries.

In 2023 De Jong was invited to write the prestigious Boekenweek-essay, a high-profile annual event in the Low Countries. Boto Banja, of het geheime genootschap der dansende schrijvers (Boto Banja, or the secret society of dancing authors) once again sees De Jong travelling. He sails from the Dominican Republic to Curaçao in commemoration of both the slave trade and those writers like Anton de Kom and Langston Hughes who also travelled the seas to tell the stories of colonization and slavery: a story from which we still need to learn a lot.

UCL Dutch finalists are currently working on a translation of an excerpt of Boto Banja, in collaboration with Dutch students at the University of Sheffield, as part of the annual Translation Project, this year generously sponsored by the Dutch Embassy and the Dutch Foundation for Literature. They work in collaboration with professional translator John Eyck, and their translation will be published on the De Lage Landen/The Low Countries platform.

On Monday 9 December, there will be a public event with Raoul de Jong at the Dutch Centre in London, ‘Who’s telling the story of Suriname’, where he will be joined by fellow Dutch-Surinamese writer Karin Amatmoekrin. The conversation will be moderated by Dr. Clive Nwonka (UCL). For more information and tickets, see here.