Alfred Birney

Alfred Birney (1951) is the author of an oeuvre of largely autobiographical fiction and non-fiction, in which his family’s history often plays a central role. He made his debut in 1987 with the novel Tamara’s Lunapark. He edited a voluminous anthology of literary fiction from the Dutch East Indies in 1998, and two of his most important novels, Vogels rond een vrouw (Birds Around A Woman, 1991) and De onschuld van een vis (The Innocence of a Fish, 1995) were translated and published in Indonesia. For The Interpreter From Java (2016), which will be published in English in early 2020, he was awarded the prestigious Libris Literature Prize 2017 and the Henriëtte Roland Holst Prize.