I giusti, Claudia Cozzi’s Italian translation of De rechtvaardigen for Iperborea has been awarded the Premio Tribùk dei Librai. This book trade prize, whose jury comprises 105 booksellers, is aimed to emphasize the important role bookshops play as cultural mediators.
In The Just, Brokken tells the story Jan Zwartendijk, the Dutch consul in Lithuania. At the beginning of the Second World War he found an ingenious way to save the lives of thousands of Jewish people who had fled Poland, by giving them visas for the Dutch island of Curaçao in the Caribbean. Brokken paints a vivid picture of Eastern Europe during the war and traces the life-stories of the rescued Jews, many of whom he was able to find and speak with.
The Dutch edition has been reprinted seven times and more than 40,000 copies have been sold. The Russian edition will be published in December 2020 by Nestor-Istoria, the Lithuanian in February 2021 by Baltos Lankos, the English edition by Scribe in Australia (March 2021), in the United Kingdom (April 2021) and in the United States (May 2021).
Jan Brokken is a writer of fiction, travel, and literary non-fiction. He gained international fame with The Rainbird, The Blind Passengers, My Little Madness, Baltic Souls, In the House of the Poet, The Reprisal, and The Cossack Garden, and his books have been translated into ten languages.
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