Daad Kajo

(Syria, 1973) was a sports and dance teacher in Syria when she came to the Netherlands in 1999. As a child she published stories and poems in Arabic, illustrating them herself with charcoal. In Holland she fell in love with the Dutch language and made her debut with the novel The seducer of Damascus. The main character is the ud player Balsam, who is constantly looking for sexual contentment. In Holland this farmer's son meets his compatriot, the cosmopolitan Barna, who also struggles with her sexuality. The Dutch culture, being much more open than the Syrian, provides her with the freedom she has always been looking for. Daad Kajo regularly performs in the Dutch media to talk about the political situation in her country. She grew up in Hassake, a village in Syria, as a member of the Christian Assyrian minority. In Nijmegen she worked as an educational assistant in second language acquisition.