Margriet Oostveen

(1968, Den Bosch, NL) debuted in 2009 with Botox op K Street (Botox on K Street) about the city of Washington, which she wrote after a years-long stay in the US. She ignored Congress and the embassies and sought out small events and unknown people, which perhaps tell us much more about a country than the things that make the global news.
She attended the funeral of a gangster, discovered the life of female night-shift cooks, and attempted to understand the self-hatred of black children. Back in the Netherlands, she went to work in similar fashion for NRC Handelsblad newspaper: instead of sitting behind her desk she went out to talk to people who normally didn't appear in its pages. Her columns are collected in Knus (Snug). In 2014 she moved to the Volkskrant newspaper.