Alfred Birney

(Netherlands, 1951) descends from a former plantation-owning family in the Dutch East Indies. His father is Indonesian-Chinese and his mother is Dutch. Recurring themes in his work include alienation from family and the inability to identify with one's mother- or fatherland. His 1987 debut novel was Tamara's Lunapark. He compiled an anthology of Dutch colonial and post-colonial literature, East-Indian Ink, in 1998. In 2002 Indische Gezichten was published, a compilation of his Dutch post-colonial novels Vogels rond een vrouw (Birds around a Woman, 1991) and De onschuld van een vis (The Innocence of a Fish, 1995). These books create an unforgettable portrait of his father. His successful autobiographical novel De tolk van Java (The Interpreter from Java, 2016) received multiple awards and was adapted for theatre. In 2019, the diary Niemand bleef (Nobody stayed) was published in the Privé Domein series, for which he was awarded the Littéraire Witte Prijs 2020. In March 2024, Zwerfpost (Wandering Post) was released, a personal selection from 25 years of articles, blog posts, columns, essays, critiques, lectures, studies, sketches, polemics, travelogues, and portraits of unknown writers with divergent perspectives on the Netherlands versus Indonesia.