I translate from Dutch into English, mostly history, reportage and non-fiction, and sometimes young adult fiction. I am an accredited translator with the Dutch Foundation for Literature (Letterenfonds). I spent twenty-five years living and working in the Netherlands before returning to London in 2024. Dutch academic prose likes to weigh every position before committing to one. A good part of my work is finding an English that keeps the scholarship intact while letting the argument move. 

Translation

I translated Jan Lucassen’s The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind (Yale University Press, 2021). My most recent translation is Do-It-Yourself Society: On Living in Lagos by the Dutch journalist Femke van Zijl, forthcoming from Narrative Landscape Press. The two books needed very different voices. One is a scholar’s long argument across millennia; the other is a reporter’s account of a city that runs on improvisation.

I also translate for cultural and academic institutions in the Netherlands and Flanders. Recent work includes the strategic plans of the Huygens Institute and the Meertens Institute, both part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), feature articles for TU Delft’s Pioneering Tech magazine, and exhibition texts for Musea Brugge.

Before I begin a book I draw up a style sheet with the author, settling names, dates, terminology and the many small decisions that would otherwise drift over the course of a long manuscript. I keep that sheet going until the final chapter, so the author always knows what their book will sound like in English.

Editing and teaching

I have been an academic editor for twenty years, editing monographs, edited volumes, theses and journals for scholars in more than fifteen countries. Publishers I’ve worked for include Cambridge University Press, Brill, Amsterdam University Press and Crius. I am language editor of the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts and the International Review of Social History (Cambridge University Press). I spent four years as managing editor of the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. From 2018 to 2022 I taught professional writing to journalism and media studies students at the University of Groningen.

Journalism and broadcasting

I started out as a senior writer and researcher at Which? magazine. In 2001 I moved to the English Service of Radio Netherlands, where I spent six years as a presenter, producer and documentary maker. I made a weekly programme on development, A Good Life, and a monthly programme for partner stations across Africa, and I recorded material in South Africa, Botswana, India and the South Pacific. My work won a gold medal at the New York Festivals International Radio Awards in 2003 and a bronze in 2004. Radio taught me to write for the ear, and to cut a sentence until it could be followed on a single hearing. I still use both when I translate reportage.

I am the founder of Scrib. (scrib.works), a curriculum that teaches academic writing to university students.