Astrid H. Roemer

(Suriname, 1947) made her mark with Over de gekte van een vrouw (About the Madness of a Woman), an experimental novel about the complexity of being a woman. In the 1990s she wrote three decolonisation novels that she called her "triplets": Gewaagd leven (Daring Life, 1996), Lijken op liefde (Resembling Love, 1997) and Was getekend (Signed, 1999), now collected as Onmogelijk moederland (Impossible Motherland). Roemer is praised in both Suriname and the Netherlands for her daring and willfulness in her now extensive oeuvre of poetry, prose and theatre texts. She was awarded the 2016 P.C. Hooft Prize, and in 2021, for her entire oeuvre, the Dutch Literary Prize. Her 2018 novel Gebroken wit (Broken White) is an impressive portrait of the Vanta family, in which Surinamese mores and norms leave a legacy. The anthology Ik ga strijden moeder: gekozen gedichten (I'm going to fight mother: chosen poems, 2021) includes work from her first collection from 1970 to poetry she published from 2015 to 2020. Around themes of identity and the contradictions between Suriname and the Netherlands, Roemer sophisticatedly interweaves the lives of five characters in her latest novel DealersDochter (Dealer's Daughter, 2023).