Astrid Roemer
Astrid Heligonda Roemer (; born 27 April 1947) is a Surinamese-Dutch writer and teacher. The Dutch-language author has published novels, drama and poetry, and in December 2015 was announced as the winner of the P. C. Hooft Award, considered the most important literary prize in the Netherlands and Belgium, which was presented in May 2016. Biography Roemer was born in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, and attended the city's Kweekschool (Surinaams Pedagogisch Instituut; SPI), a teaching college, where in 1965, she was discovered as a poet. She travelled to the Netherlands the following year, and went back and forth between Suriname and the Netherlands (she also lived in The Hague) until the 1970s. In 1970, she published her first book of poetry, Sasa mijn actuele zijn. Her first novel, Neem mij terug Suriname (Take Me Back Suriname, 1974), was very successful in Suriname, and was rewritten as Nergens ergens ("Nowhere somewhere", 1983). She took up residence permanently in the Netherlands in 1975, after being fired from her teaching job for refusing to celebrate the Sinterklaas celebrations, which include a blackface character named Zwarte Piet. From the 1970s on, she was a prolific writer, publishing novels, drama, and poetry; her breakthrough