Adrift in the Middle Kingdom

About Jan Jacob Slauerhoff

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898-1936) was a ship's doctor serving in south-east Asia and is one of the most important twentieth-century Dutch-language writers. He is best known for his Modernist poetry but his two novels published in English as The Forbidden Kingdom and Adrift in the Middle Kingdom are very popular. He died of tuberculosis in 1936. David McKay is an American Dutch-to-English translator based in The Netherlands. His clients include major museums scholars and publishing houses and he is an approved translator by the Dutch Foundation for Literature a semi-governmental organization. In 2017 he was awarded the biennial Vondel Translation Prize for his translation of War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans. Arie Pos has lectured on Dutch literature and culture at the universities of Coimbra Lisbon and Oporto and is a translator of Portuguese literature into Dutch and vice versa. As well as a Portuguese translation of The Forbidden Kingdom he has published many articles and several books on Jan Jacob Slauerhoff and his work. Wendy Gan was Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong until 2021. She is the author of Fruit Chan's Durian Durian (2005) and Women Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing (2009). Her latest book Comic China: Representing Common Ground 1890-1945 (2018) examines Anglo-American representations of China and the politics of humour.