Astrid Roemer

Biography

Roemer was born in Paramaribo and attended the city's Kweekschool, a teaching college, where in 1965, she was discovered as a poet. She traveled to the Netherlands in the following year, and went back and forth between Suriname and the Netherlands (she lived in Den Haag for a while) until the 1970s. In 1970, she published her first book of poetry, Sasa mijn actuele zijn. Her first novel, Neem mij terug Suriname (Take me back Suriname, 1974), was very successful in Suriname, and was rewritten as Nergens ergens ("Nowhere somewhere", 1983). She took up residence permanently in the Netherlands in 1975, after being fired from her teaching job for refusing to celebrate the Sinterklaas celebrations, which include a blackface character named Zwarte Piet.

From the 1970s on, she was a prolific writer, publishing novels, drama, and poetry; her breakthrough in the Netherlands was the fragmentary novel Over de gekte van een vrouw ("On the madness of a woman"), a novel investigating identity and the oppression of women, which established her as a feminist writer and made her a role model for lesbians. She spent some time in the city council of Den Haag for the GroenLinks party, in 1989, but left quickly after a dispute with the party. Between 1996 and 1998, she published a trilogy which is now among the best-known of her works, though no longer in print: Gewaagd leven (1996), Lijken op liefde (1997) en Was getekend (1998). The novels were published together as Roemers drieling ("Roember's triplets", 2001). The German translation of Lijken op liefde was awarded the LiBeratur Prize.

From 2006 to 2009, Roemer lived in Suriname again. In her later years, she has published little. Her autobiography, Zolang ik leef ben ik niet dood ("As long as I'm living I'm not dead"), appeared in 2004, and a collection of love poems called Afnemend ("Diminishing") was published in 2012, in only 125 copies. Roemer disappeared from the public eye, and traveled the world for fifteen years, with "cat, laptop, and backpack". Her first public appearance in a long time was planned for the 2015 premiere of De wereld heeft gezicht verloren, a biographical documentary by Cindy Kerseborn; Kerseborn had looked for her on the island Skye but finally found her in a Belgian monastery. Roemer did not show up for the premiere but sent a text message urging people to love one another.

Roemer won the P. C. Hooft Award for 2016, over the favored candidate, Arnon Grunberg, and becoming the first Caribbean author to win the award. According to the jury, Roemer's novels are a literary imagination of the history of Suriname, a history that is not very well known in the Netherlands outside of the topics of slavery and the December murders but is "inextricably intertwined with the history of our country...and thus, by way of Roemer's unique oeuvre, with our literature". The jury added, "political engagement and literary experiment go hand in hand with Roemer".