Frank Westerman

Biography

Frank Westerman is the author of The Bridge over the Tara (1994), Srebrenica: The Blackest Scenario (1997), The Republic of Grain (1999) and Engineers of the Soul (2002). These last two books were awarded prestigious prizes in the Netherlands and became bestsellers. In 2005 Westerman received the Flemish Golden Owl Award for El Negro en ik (El Negro and Me). His latest book is Ararat (2007). His work has been sold to the UK, Germany, France and Spain, a.o.

Titles

Engineers of the Soul

(Ingenieurs van de ziel, 2002)

Engineers of the Soul is the riveting story of how authors were forced to write in service of an ideology, in this case communism as it was practiced in the Soviet Union. Westerman’s sharp pen combines a fine example of investigative journalism with a dash of literary history. In the book’s ingenious construction he continually contrasts the Soviet past with present-day Russia, leading the reader into a maze of mirrors through Absurdistan. Continued...

El Negro and Me

(El Negro en ik, 2004)

In december 1983, Frank Westerman, a 19-year-old student of tropical agriculture, visited a museum in a small Spanish village and found himself eye to eye with a stuffed black man in a glass display case. It was an experience that would remain with him for ever. Twenty years later, by then a well-known journalist and author, he set out to identify the man known simply as El Negro. The Negro. Who was he? When did he live? Where did he come from? Continued...

Ararat

(Ararat, 2007)

As so often among Western Europeans, religion had slipped out of Frank Westerman’s life unnoticed - until he became a father and wondered which aspects of his own religious background and upbringing he wanted to pass on to his daughter. Ararat is a piece of highly personal journalism, splendidly combining Westerman’s own questions with the history of religion, political conflict and advances in scientific research. Continued...

The Republic Of Grain

(De graanrepubliek, 2008/1999)

From time immemorial, the Dutch have owed their survival to pushing back the sea. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the dikes will be pierced and water let in once again. In the grain republic of Groningen where the clay is richest and the best grain harvested, the centuries-old polders will be flooded. The farming community, and with it a thousand-year-old tradition, will have to yield to environmental pressures and recreation. Continued...