Richard de Nooy

Richard de Nooy (1965) grew up in Johannesburg, but has lived in Amsterdam for more than 35 years. He writes novels, short stories and non-fiction in English and Dutch.

He is currently translating his latest book, Verraad op Huize Zwaluwenburg, which was published by Nijgh & Van Ditmar in the Netherlands in 2022. The book is based on his mother’s experiences as a trainee nurse at a psychiatric institution for women and girls in the Netherlands during World War II. The author went in search of people mentioned in his mother’s stories, finding books, unpublished memoires, interviews, letters and even a journal written by a Jewish refugee hiding at the institution. Together their stories form a human tapestry that captures the heroism and tragedy of life at the Zwaluwenburg.

De Nooy's debut novel, Six Fang Marks and a Tetanus Shot (Jacana, 2007), won the University of Johannesburg Prize for Best First Book. It was later published in Dutch as Zes beetwonden en een tetanusprik (Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2008) in the Netherlands.

De Nooy was awarded a grant by the Dutch Foundation for Literature to write his second novel in Dutch. Zacht als Staal was published in August 2010 and was long-listed for the prestigious AKO Literatuurprijs 2011. It was published in English as The Big Stick (Jacana, 2011) in South Africa.

De Nooy's third novel, Zendingsdrang, was published in Dutch by Nijgh & Van Ditmar in January 2013. The English edition was published as The Unsaid by Jacana in South Africa in 2014.

His most recent novel, Van kleine helden, was published in Dutch in the Netherlands in May 2017. The English edition of this book has not yet been published, because De Nooy was distracted by six years of research and writing on his first work of non-fiction, Verraad op Huize Zwaluwenburg.