Astrid Roemer genomineerd voor de Booker Prize
“The classic of queer literature”
Astrid H. Roemer staat op de lijst van genomineerden voor de International Booker Prize 2025. In alle gevallen gaat het om vertaalde boeken. Roemer is opvallend genoeg niet genomineerd met een van haar recente boeken, maar met de Engelse vertaling door Lucy Scott van Over de gekte van een vrouw uit 1982: On a Woman’s Madness. Hieronder een interview met Roemer over haar nominatie.
Astrid Roemer
The inspirations behind On a Woman’s Madness, and how I wrote it
My novel was a search among some of my personal questions: is it possible to be or to become a ‘happy woman’ in post-slavery/colonial Paramaribo/Suriname?
In my mid-twenties I was mad about cosmology and other related science – living in Holland, buying books, trying to dive into difficult physics. In a way, I’d been slowly scanning my tiny universe, too. It was like daydreaming my pain away. I never thought of publishing any of those intimate writings. It happened and I’m still blushing.
The book that made me fall in love with reading
Lees hier verder op thebookerprizes.com
On a Woman’s Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America’s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society’s expectations.
Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer’s classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. “I’m Noenka,” she responds resolutely, “which means Never Again.”
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