Joukje Akveld

Joukje Akveld (b. 1974) studied Dutch language and literature and worked in publicity and as a picture-book translator for Lemniscaat. She now writes about theatre and children’s books in newspaper Het Parool. After a number of publications about illustrators and authors, she made her debut in 2012 with her first picture book, Olle wist zeker dat hij geen bril nodig had, which has been translated into a number of languages. Her love of animals has played an increasingly important role in Akveld’s work. In Een aap op de wc (2015, Zilveren Griffel), she wrote about the German bombing of Rotterdam’s zoo. She is currently travelling around various countries in southern Africa for a year, working on her next book.

On Your Bike

(Querido Kinderboeken, 2014)

When Bobby the panda and William the dog have an argument, William says to Bobby, “Go on! On your bike!” So Bobby gets onto his bike and goes for a long, breath-taking ride through the town and countryside.

An Ape in the Toilet

A Zoo in Wartime

(Hoogland & Van Klaveren, 2015, 128 pages)

Thanks to Anne Frank and her diary, the story of the occupation of the Netherlands in World War II is known all over the world. Anyone who wants to find out more about the subject can read books by hundreds of authors. However, many of those accounts are missing something essential: how it really feels to find yourself, from one day to the next, living in a world of danger and uncertainty.

Whose Is That Tail?

(Gottmer, 2017, 32 pages)

The idea is simple, in this fourth part of a series by Joukje Akveld. It’s a book with the same question on each page: which of the four animals on the right owns the tail on the left? You find out the answer by turning the page.

We Were Here First

(Gottmer, 2017, 224 pages)

Cheetahs who hardly ever breed, rhinoceroses on the run from armed poachers, penguins who get in the way, pesky bag-stealing baboons. Journalist and writer Joukje Akveld hitches a ride on a cargo ship to South Africa and visits shelters for wild animals with problems.