Author, performer, columnist, presenter Raoul de Jong was born in Rotterdam in 1984, son of a Dutch white mother and a largely absent Surinamese father. He developed a taste for travel at an early age: at nineteen, De Jong travelled through West Africa for the charity Plan International to visit a series of aid projects in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Other trips would follow including a stay in New York – surviving for four months on fifty dollars – and a long walk from Rotterdam to Marseille in honour of his deceased dog.
Boto Banja
In 2023 De Jong was asked to write the prestigious Boekenweek-essay, a high profile annual event in the Low Countries. In Boto Banja, of het geheime genootschap der dansende schrijvers (Boto Banja, or the secret society of dancing authors) , De Jong sails from the Dominican Republic to Curaçao in the wake of his enslaved ancestors, laying bare a worldwide network of ‘dancing writers’ who all tell the same story, a story that reaches far beyond the Netherlands and Suriname.
Boto Banja can be read as an extention of his latest novel Jaguarman (2020), a powerful retelling of the history of Suriname and a personal quest for one of his ancestors, a medicine man from the Amazon rainforest. It was nominated for the Libris Literary Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature.
Raoul De Jong in Sheffield
Raoul de Jong will work with our final year students on our annual Translation Project. Together with students from UCL and under the guidance of professional translator John Eyck, students will translate an extract from De Jong’s essay. The translation will be published on the digital culture platform the-low-countries.com. Our translation project will culminate in our Translation Symposium with the author and the translator on Tuesday 17 December.
Public Event
All students and staff are invited to meet Raoul de Jong and John Eyck or a public interview and a presentation of our translation at 5pm in Diamond Workroom 2.
This project is kindly sponsored by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in London and the Dutch Foundation for Literature. Raoul de Jong is one of the transnational authors that is part of the Sheffield AHRC funded research project: Beyond the national narrative.