Chris de Stoop - This is My Farm

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Chris de Stoop / Chris de Stoop – This is My Farm

Chris de Stoop – This is My Farm

Rights sold

Fischer (Germany)
Shanghai ’99 (China)

Read our sample translation of This is My Farm

About the book

The Hedwige Polder, the most famous stretch of reclaimed land in the Belgian lowlands, is to be flooded again no matter what. It has become symbolic of old farmland forced to make way for new nature reserves. Nothing could touch the local population more deeply.

Chris de Stoop, himself a farmer’s son from the area, returns to his parents’ farm, which is suddenly unoccupied. While running the farm, he looks at the changed landscape around him. He is the kind of person who can go into raptures over a comely cow, or wax lyrical about a freshly ploughed field. He looks back at the farming life that made the land what it has been for a thousand years.

The disappearance of the farmer is a Europe-wide phenomenon, but nowhere is it as distressing as it is here. De Stoop watches the bulldozers advance, demolishing centuries-old farmhouses to create ‘new nature’ as compensation for the expansion of industry.

Fork in hand, De Stoop gives a wonderful account from the dungheap of the ancient rustic life that must make way for new nature. - VPRO Gids

It is a beautiful and poignant book. - De Volkskrant

An impressive book about the social drama of farmers up against the wall. Perhaps the most personal book from the rich oeuvre of the leading investigative journalist. - De Correspondent

Author

Chris de Stoop (b. 1958) is an author and a journalist for the Flemish weekly Knack. In 2004 he was awarded the Golden Owl Readers’ Prize for Zij kwamen uit het Oosten (They Came from the East). In 2010 he wrote Vrede zij met u, zuster (Peace Be With You, Sister), about the first Jihadists to leave for Syria and Iraq. With his debut Ze zijn zo lief, meneer (They’re So Sweet, Sir 1992) he became the first to write the inside story of the international trafficking of women, a bombshell of a book that caused great commotion at home and abroad. In 2015 Dit is mijn hof (This is My Farm) was published, which became a bestseller and of which translation rights have been sold to Germany and China to date.

Additional book information

Literary non-fiction
ISBN 9789023499688
Number of pages: 286
World rights: De Bezige Bij
Price: € 12,50