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Off-White

by Astrid Roemer

Narrator Christel Mutombo

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Length 12 hours 29 minutes

Language English

Translators Lucy Scott & David McKay

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Summary
About the author
About the translators

It’s 1966 in Suriname, on the Caribbean coast of South America, and the long shadow of colonialism still hangs over the country. Grandma Bee is the proud, cigar-smoking matriarch of the Vanta family, which is an intricate mix of Creole, Maroon, French, Indian, Indigenous, British, and Jewish backgrounds. But Grandma Bee is dying, a cough has settled deep in her lungs.

The approaching end has her thinking about the members of her family she’s lost, especially one of her favorite granddaughters, Heli, who has been sent away to the Netherlands because of an affair with her white teacher. Ultimately, there’s only one question Bee must answer: What is a family? If her descendants are spread across the world, don’t look similar, don’t share a heritage, and don’t even know each other, what bond will they have once she has died?

A moving portrait of a woman finding peace in the legacy that is her daughters and granddaughters, Off-White, keenly translated by Lucy Scott and David McKay, is also a searing and complex portrait of male violence, the legacy of colonialism, and a dismantling of what it means to be “white”. Written after a nearly 20-year break from publishing, Off-White is another masterpiece from the only Surinamese author to win the prestigious Dutch Literature Award.

Fiction Fiction - Literary

In 1966, at the age of 19, Astrid Roemer emigrated from Suriname to the Netherlands. She identifies herself as a cosmopolitan writer. Exploring themes of race, gender, family, and identity, her poetic, unconventional prose stands in the tradition of authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. She was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize in 2016, and the three-yearly Dutch Literature Prize (Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren) in 2021.

Lucy Scott is a translator of Caribbean literature written in Dutch and French. Her short story and essay translations thus far have appeared in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee Review and in Wilderness House Literary Review. She's the translator of Astrid Roemer's On a Woman's Madness (Two Lines Press, 2022) and Off-White (Two Lines Press, 2024).

David McKay is a literary translator in The Hague, best known for his translations of novels by the Flemish author Stefan Hertmans, including The Ascent. Other recent publications include Charlotte van den Broeck's Bold Ventures, described in the New York Times as "a small marvel: a monument to human beings continuing to reach for the skies." He has been shortlisted for various translation prizes and won the Vondel Prize for Hertmans's War and Turpentine. He will serve as the American Literary Translators Association Dutch-English mentor for the second time in 2023. In recent years, he has translated work by various Dutch and Flemish playwrights, including Freek Mariën, Anna Carlier, Abke Haring and Jibbe Willems. His translation of Mariën's The Wetsuitman is being premiered in 2022 by The Cherry Arts (Ithaca, NY) and Foreign Affairs (London) and has been published in The Mercurian.