Brooklyn Book Festival: Dutch Literature Prize-winning Author Astrid Roemer
2:00 pm ET
Astrid Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the Dutch Literature Prize, will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival(opens in a new tab) to talk about On a Woman’s Madness, translated by Lucy Scott.
Mazes Of The Mind: On Mapping Extreme States
International luminaries Astrid Roemer, Carlos Fonseca, and Norman Erikson Pasaribu come together to discuss the precarity of dislocation, memory, and desire. In Astrid Roemer’s queer classic On a Woman’s Madness (tr. Lucy Scott), we meet a woman fleeing her hometown of Suriname, and in Carlos Fonseca’s luminous Austral (tr. Megan McDowell), a professor on a journey to a forgotten city in Guatemala (and beyond) to uncover the mysteries of a friend’s final novel. Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Happy Stories, Mostly (tr. Tiffany Tsao) constructs speculative and surreal futures out of loss, stories that gleam like magic mirrors. Through dreamscape, striking postcolonial commentary, and dark humor, each book offers a fragment of hope.
The festival program will be followed by a half-hour book signing.
In 1966, at the age of 19, Astrid Roemer emigrated from Suriname to the Netherlands. She identifies herself as a cosmopolitan writer. Exploring themes of race, gender, family, and identity, her poetic, unconventional prose stands in the tradition of authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. She was awarded the P.C. Hooft Award in 2016, and the three-yearly Dutch Literature Prize (Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren) in 2021. On a Woman’s Madness, her English-language debut in Lucy Scott’s translation, was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Her novel DealersDochter (2023) was nominated for the Boon Literature Prize, a prestigious literary award given annually to the best book originally written in Dutch.