The Best Books You've Never Heard of

What role do the doorkeepers of literature play - publishers, editors, booksellers, agents and scouts - when it comes to the colour filter?

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Date and time Friday 17 January 2020 20:40 tot 21:01 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 2

What role do the doorkeepers of literature play - publishers, editors, booksellers, agents and scouts - when it comes to the colour filter? Who ultimately decides what is "good literature" and on what basis? We discuss the issue with Ellah Wakatama, Editor-at-Large of Scottish publishing firm Cannongate Books, Ebissé Rouw, editor at Dutch podcast platform Dipsaus Publicaties, and Mylo Freeman, writer and illustrator of children's books best known for her Princess Arabella picture-book series.

Ebissé Rouw

(Ethiopia) lived in Addis Abeba (elevation 2477.29m) until age 14. Then she came to the Netherlands (elevation -1.01m) and became a Dutch-Ethiopian, black, and a non-Western immigrant. She currently works for the Cultural Council in a combination of policy and communications. As an editor for Dipsaus Publicaties, she has ties to the Pluim publishing house. Together with a number of Twitterati she set up the virtual consultancy bureau Kopje Koffie Doen? She is one of the compilers of Zwart (Black), an anthology of literature by black writers from the Low Countries. She works as a programmer for the Winternachten festival in The Hague.
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Ellah Wakatama

(Zimbabwe, 1966) is Editor-at-Large of Scottish independent publishing firm Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University and Chair of the Cain Prize for African Writing. A London-based editor and critic, she was the founder Publishing Editor of Indigo Press. Her journalism has appeared in The Telegraph, Guardian and Observer newspapers, and she is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa. Her broadcasting includes reviews for NPR and BBC4.
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Nancy Jouwe

(The Netherlands, 1967)  is a cultural historian and works as a freelance researcher, writer and curator with a focus on intersectionality, the (post)colonial past, slavery and related contemporary social and cultural practices. She is working on a PhD at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and is a fellow at the Utrecht School of the Arts from 2022-2025. As author and co-editor, she has released several publications on the ZMV women's movement in the Netherlands, gender and colonialism, and the Dutch slavery past; the most recent collections are Gendered Empire (Verloren, 2020), Slavernij en de stad Utrecht (Walburg Pers, 2021), Slavernij Herbezien (LM Publishers, 2021), Caleidoscopische Visies (Mazirel, 2024) and Gids Slavernijverleden van de Kaap (LM Publishers, 2025).
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Mylo Freeman

(Netherlands) is Dutch-American. After her studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, she lived for several years in New York.  She worked for magazines and started creating children's books. In 1998 she won the Kiekebook Prize for Potje!, which also apeared in translation. In the meantime she has produced about 50 picture books and is best known for her 12-part Princess Arabella series, now also a puppet series, an app and a play. It helps fill a much needed niche: picture books with more diversity. Freeman also leads workships, gives readings and appears in musical performances. She is the chair of Stichting3, which aims to stimulate diversity in children's literature via children's book festivals and reading-aloud competitions.
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