Biography of a Fly

Jaap Robben is a poet, playwright, performer, and acclaimed children's author. You Have Me to Love, his first novel for adults, won the 2014 Dutch Booksellers Award, the Dioraphte Prize, and the ANV Award for best Dutch debut. Robben was chosen as one of the featured debut authors at the 2018 Brooklyn Book Festival. Summer Brother, his second novel, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and received rave reviews in the US upon its release.

David Doherty studied English and literary linguistics in the UK before moving to the Netherlands, where he has been translating all manner of Dutch texts since 1996. He was commended by the jury of the 2017 Vondel Translation Prize for Marente de Moor's The Dutch Maiden and Jaap Robben's You Have Me to Love, and was runner-up in 2019 for his translation of Monte Carlo by Peter Terrin. Jaap Robben's Summer Brother, one of Doherty's most recent translations, was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.