From 28 February until 3 March 2018, Dutch writer and philosopher Joke J. Hermsen will be in Serbia to promote the newly published Serbian edition of her 2014 work Kairos. The Serbian translation is written by Olivera Petrović van der Leeuw for publishing house Kontra Teg / Futura. Hermsen will be reading from her work in Belgrade and in Novi Sad.
Joke J. Hermsen (1961) is one of the most prominent Dutch philosophers of her generation. She has a particular interest in time, memory and art, and has written extensively about the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch and Lou Andreas Salomé. Her award-wining essay collection Stil de tijd (Time On Our Side), published in 2009, sold more than 50,000 copies. She broke through to a broad readership with the novel De profielschets (The Profile, 2004). Her fourth novel, De liefde dus (So It’s Love, 2008), was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize and won the Halewijn Prize. Her novel Tweeduister, which was published in 2000, had been translated into German by Thomas Hauth for publishing house Bastei Lübbe AG. Kairos is her first work to appear in a Serbian translation.
The collection of essays Kairos is a logical follow-up to her manifesto for a slow future Stil de tijd. In Ancient Greek, the word kairos meant the right, critical, or opportune moment. In her new book she makes a passionate plea for a new kind of engagement, which can inspire us for new ways of ‘wishful thinking’ that will help us to find our way out of the economical and ecological crisis. In 2014, the year that the original Dutch edition of Kairos was published, it was the bestselling philosophy book of the year.
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