If you arrive in the Netherlands for the first time in your life and it’s December, it’s easy to get the impression there’s one test of Dutchness, one path to fitting in: ice skating. You can’t avoid it or pretend it doesn’t exist.

The Spanish translation of Marcia Luyten’s book Moederland, about the young years of Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, was recently published, translated by Marcela Cazau. At the invitation of the Argentinian publisher Planeta, the author made a promotional trip to Buenos Aires, supported by the Dutch Foundation for Literature. Marcia Luyten wrote a report about her experiences.

Between mid-November and mid-December, a presentation of Dutch children’s and youth culture called Ton monde, plein de merveilles took place in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris. This multidisciplinary collaboration between Dutch foundations, French partners and the Dutch embassy in Paris consisted of screenings of Dutch children’s films, dance and theatre performances and, of course, literary activities.

There’s no getting around it: 2021 has turned out to be the year in which the importance of translation and translations and the role of interpreters and translators has become more prominent than ever. Especially now, with Europe sometimes conspicuous by its absence from the world stage, it’s essential to maintain strong links between the countries of the old continent and to keep attention focused on free movement back and forth from one language to another. Translators are indispensable in this regard, enabling us to gain understanding and continue to garner knowledge of each other’s histories, backgrounds and lives, from a social, historical and cultural point of view.

It was a question that had occupied people’s minds for months: would the Frankfurt Book Fair take place? And if so, in what form, and who would be there? Since the Netherlands and Flanders had been guests of honour in 2016, the Dutch Foundation for Literature, along with other focus countries, had been kept abreast of efforts to organise a safe fair in online meetings with the fair’s organisers. Should masks be worn? How much distance should visitors keep from each other? How wide should the corridors be? In the summer it became clear that the fair would take place – with restrictions, but there was an air of optimism.

I live and work in Bezuidenhout, a mainly residential area of The Hague to the south of a large wooded park, the Haagse Bos. During World War II, this park was used by the German occupying forces as cover for the V2 rockets fired at English cities. On March 3, 1945, the Royal Air Force tried to bomb the Haagse Bos, but the pilots were given the wrong coordinates. This human error led to the tragic destruction of much of Bezuidenhout by Allied aircraft.

What can you learn about the Netherlands through Dutch children’s books? Etsuko Nozaka, translator Dutch-Japanese, sees the Netherlands as a country with a great emphasis on freedom and individual rights. What kind of children’s books does that yield? In this blog, originally published by Ehon Navi, with more than 20 million readers one of the largest Japanese websites on childrens literature, addresses this question by zooming in on books by three Dutch authors: Anna Woltz, Els Pelgrom and Dick Bruna.

We Slaves of Suriname by the Surinamese writer and activist Anton de Kom (1898-1945) is one of the most important anti-colonial writings of the 20th century. It is on a par with W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (1961). The book is the first, but still one of the few works to describe Dutch colonial rule and Suriname’s slave economy.

Dutch literature is as varied as the Netherlands’ complex history. Wilma Scheffers, advisor of Writers Unlimited festival in The Hague and literary festival Woordnacht Rotterdam, offers a brief overview of the former Dutch colonies and takes a look at three important classics from the Dutch Antilles, Surinam and Indonesia respectively.