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His books have been translated into English, German, Italian, Basque, Danish, Swedish, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Papiamento and Hindi. His biggest international success is the book Hoe mooi wit ik ben (How Beautifully White I Am), which won prizes including the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis and the Italian Premio Nazionale di Letteratura per ragazzi ‘Città di Bella.’

Dolf Verroen

You expect a children’s author writing about the dark days of slavery to make it explicitly clear to the reader how wrong slavery was. What is unusual about this book is that Verroen doesn’t do that at all. He wants to let his readers judge for themselves and so he has Maria narrate the story in a detached, almost emotionless way. As a child of her time, it’s perfectly normal for her to see a person as a utensil. Besides, Maria doesn’t stop to think about her behaviour. She prefers to spend her time dreaming about a potential husband and the way her breasts are growing. However, Verroen skilfully selects shocking situations along the way (for example, the slave has to lick up a cake that has fallen on the floor), helping his young readers to draw their own conclusions more easily.

Verroen doesn’t present us with any ready-made moral, but makes his readers reflect deeply and judge for themselves.

The events in Maria’s life move past in 40 short chapters, like slides in a projector. Each chapter consists of a number of short sentences of four or five words. These sentences are surrounded by a lot of space on the page, each one beginning on a new line. This, combined with the occasional subtle internal rhyme, means that the text as a whole has an almost poetic feel to it.All in all, Slaaf Kindje Slaaf is a surprising book. Never before has a Dutch author managed so incisively and in so few words to make young readers think about a subject. Verroen found inspiration during a visit to the former Dutch colony of Suriname, but in the story itself time and place are kept vague. This gives the book a universal feeling, broadening Maria’s story to exploitation and discrimination in general.By Harm de Jonge

This is a book that touches your heart.

Book

Asset

Assets

Slaaf Kindje Slaaf

n the days of slavery it could happen: you’re the daughter of a plantation owner and when you’re twelve you get your own slave. Slaaf Kindje Slaaf by Dolf Verroen begins with Maria’s birthday party. Little Koko is brought in on a silver plate and Maria’s aunt gives her a whip to go with her present. That’s how you beat the laziness out of them and if you really don’t like the boy, you can just sell him again at the market. Just like Papa’s beautiful slave woman, whose value has sunk considerably since Maria’s jealous mother smashed her face up.

My Very Own Slave

While many children’s books about the Second World War focus on excitement and adventure, Verroen writes quietly about the life of an ordinary, rather shy little boy, who does not play a heroic role. The war is something that happens to Joop and, as an eleven-year-old, he has to cope with it as best he can. This passivity is a strong basis for the book and, historically speaking, a realistic one. War and Friendship, then, does not rely on suspense for its impact, but on the personal, perfect tone in which Verroen writes. The brief chapters, with atmospheric black-and-white miniatures by Charlotte Dematons, concisely describe scenes from day-to-day life in wartime Holland, with the real drama concealed within small observations and comments: ‘I thought Mr Millenaar would say something about the raid, but he just started with grammar as usual.’ Sometimes the danger comes close to home, as when a neighbour is shot in a Nazi reprisal. Verroen writes about this incident plainly and honestly. Then Joop discovers that his friend Kees’s parents are members of the NSB, the Dutch national-socialist movement, a political party that collaborated with the Nazis in the war. He’s shocked, but he still wants to stay friends with Kees. Verroen makes it easy to identify with Joop’s dilemma. For example, when Joop’s mother hisses at him to keep walking when they see Kees: ‘I wanted to yell, to tear myself away. I did nothing. I walked past him as if he were a stranger.’ Dolf Verroen wrote this gem as the gift book for the annual Children’s Book Week in the Netherlands. In October 2016, an astounding 345,000 copies were distributed and the book was very positively received by the critics.

The greatest asset of 'War and Friendship' is Verroen’s unemotional tone, the small sentences that embody a life.

'War and Friendship' hits the bullseye.

Children's books

It is, of course, no coincidence that the boy on the front of 'Oorlog en vriendschap' (War and Friendship) wears exactly the same distinctive round glasses as the 88-year-old author Dolf Verroen. The protagonist may be called Joop, but his experiences are the wartime memories of Verroen himself.

War and Friendship

Dolf Verroen is the author of this read-aloud book full of princess stories, which cheerfully mocks the conventions of the traditional fairytale. As the genre requires, Verroen’s princesses are destined to marry rich princes, but the road to the altar takes some strange twists and turns. This is mainly the fault of the princesses themselves, some of whom are rather unconventional. One is bald, while another is an argumentative shrew. Finding a suitable prince for that kind of princess is certainly a challenge! No wonder the royal fathers in this light-hearted fairytale parody spend a lot of their time moaning and groaning.Illustrator Thé Tjong-Khing, who received the prestigious Max Velthuijs prize for his oeuvre, is in his element with these stubborn royal ladies. The characters seem to be frozen mid-action in his tableau-vivant-like scenes. And it’s a delight to see the beautifully grouchy expressions that he puts on those regal faces.

Funny fairytales form an apprenticeship for literature.

The princesses in De prinses en de paradijstuin (The Princess and the Paradise Garden) couldn’t care less about royal etiquette. Instead of marrying a prince, they’d rather have a swineherd or a stable lad. And when their eyes do happen to fall on a majestic specimen, they always seem to be lazy good-for-nothings or have bandy legs.

The Princess and the Paradise Garden

This is a small and tender story about Thomas, who is staying with his grandparents when Grandpa dies. Grandma says he’s not allowed to go and look at Grandpa, because ‘death is for old people, not for children.’ Thomas thinks: ‘Huh? I’m nearly ten!’ – and he sneaks upstairs. He doesn’t think dead Grandpa is scary, just strange. ‘I suddenly know what I’m really seeing: he’s not dreaming anymore.’In the days after Grandpa’s death, Thomas thinks back to his stories about his adventurous dreams. Dematons depicts this beautifully, capturing Thomas’s experiences in detailed black-and-white illustrations, which always have a single accent in red: Grandpa’s scarf or Thomas’s hat. You see the boy from a short distance, which emphasizes his sense of being lost, while Grandpa’s dreams fill double spreads, in delicate line drawings on a coloured background. Sometimes those lines are ethereal and white, as in the most beautiful illustration, one of Grandpa flying among the skyscrapers of New York.Meanwhile Verroen writes succinctly and in a sober, direct tone about what Thomas is experiencing. He expresses his feelings in touching sentences. About the palpable emptiness in Grandpa’s familiar kitchen: ‘I sit across from Grandpa, who isn’t there anymore.’ And about the fact that he shouldn’t cry: ‘I don’t even know if I’m sad. It’s just like something’s not there anymore. Not an arm or a leg or something like that. Something inside. Oh, I don’t know.’It is a dream about Grandpa that ultimately helps Thomas through his grief. Dematons rounds off the story: on the final endpapers, the boy is wearing not only his red hat but also Grandpa’s red scarf. A beautiful book, full of consolation.

Verroen shows once again how writing should be done: flawless, simple, exactly right […] Dematons produces fresh new work.

This combination of author and artist is an absolute winner: together, they show perfectly what is going on inside the head of a boy who is almost ten.

At ninety years old, Dolf Verroen is the oldest children’s writer in the Netherlands who is still having books published. Two years ago, he surprised readers with the flawless 'Oorlog en vriendschap''(War and Friendship), his first collaboration with the illustrator Charlotte Dematons. This apparently went well, as 'Droomopa'(Dream Grandpa) has also been illustrated by the same artist.

Dream Grandpa

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