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literature

The Top 5 Literature Stories of the Year

14 December 2020 2 min. reading time Best of 2020

1. What to Do with Offensive Books?

Oudeennieuwecover Jommeke

The judgment ‘offensive’ is inextricably intertwined with time and culture. Nevertheless, it doesn’t follow that we should keep our hands off old texts, especially when it comes to children’s books.

As the provocative exhibition ‘Offensive Books?’ at the House of the Book in The Hague showed, the written word is the ideal tool for planting pernicious ideologies in young minds.
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2. A Love-Hate Relationship With Dutch Children's Books

Schermafbeelding 2020 02 26 om 16 36 26

Dutch-language children’s books are doing well abroad. But when they deal with taboos, some books are too unconventional for the anglophone market.

Research by Lucelle Pardoe shows that especially Dutch publishers encounter these problems, because they target large countries such as the USA and the UK. Flemish publishers do find a market for children’s books without compromising, because they aim at other countries.
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3. Multatuli in the Age of Decolonisation and #MeToo

Gedenksteen Multatuli c Twitter account Arthur Japin
© Twitter / Arthur Japin

Multatuli was born two hundred years ago. Now that he is once again in the limelight, criticism of his ideas also resounds. Was the Dutch writer really such an anti-colonial rebel? And what about his preference for young girls?

Elsbeth Etty, president of the Multatuli Society, gives clear answers.
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4. My First Murder

Schermafbeelding 2020 06 11 om 18 46 51
© Bob Bronshoff

Former opera and theatre director Martin Michael Driessen is an acclaimed writer. His novels Rivers and The Pelican were translated into English by Jonathan Reeder.

The American-born Reeder also translated Driessen’s story My First Murder from the collection of short stories of the same name. You could read it on the low countries for the first time in English, with an introduction by Reeder himself.
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5. Old Work, Young Writers

Iduna Paalmancollage
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam / © Marianne Hommersom

At the request of the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren eighteen young Flemish and Dutch authors each brought a painting from the Rijksmuseum back to life.

They wrote a new text about an old work from the Gallery of Honour, based on one key question: what do you see when you look at these paintings through gender glasses?
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Tom Christiaens

editor the low countries and deputy editor-in-chief de lage landen

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