About me

Since 2022 I am the Southeast Asia correspondent for Dutch newspaper NRC (www.nrc.nl). I am currently living and working in Jakarta, Indonesia. From 2018 to 2022 I reported as a freelance South Asia correspondent from New Delhi, India.

On this website you can have a look at my portfolio: stories, interviews, blogs and photos about issues regarding world cultures, society, history, travel, religion and cultural exchange. Stuff I produced as a journalist, budding novelist and as curator India for the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology (www.volkenkunde.nl). The moment that I’m rich and famous I promise to hire someone to translate the articles and travel stories shown on this site, but for now they are only in Dutch. I also produce photos, feel free to have a look. If you are interested in using one, please let me know, we’ll work out a fee. Sorry, they are not for free.

I was born on the first of November of 1974 in a small Dutch village, bordering Germany. When I was eighteen I hurried out to live in Utrecht, a city in the heart of the Netherlands, to make sure there was more than just cows and awful long bike rides – usually in the pouring rain – to get to school everyday. A few years later I graduated in Art History (MA) at Utrecht University and completed a postgraduate course Broadcast Journalism at Groningen University. What I did after that, you can check out on my resume.

My books

CLUB KARMA

Travel bookset in India (2008)

Club Karma is my first book. It’s an autobiographical travel book, set in India. The story deals with East and West, love and death. Published May 2008, by Thomas Rap, imprint of Dutch publishing house De Bezige Bij.

ZHONGGUO

Travel novel (KIT Publishers, Amsterdam, 2012)

Main character Anna, journalist, is exploring (and judging) modern China, its politics, culture, and taoism. Her end goal is to find the exact geographical centre of China. That, she will find, but as her trip goes along she has trouble keeping her personal moral compass straight. The novel is loosely based on my travels in 2008.

THE HIDDEN GARDEN

A nonfiction book about Indian goldsmiths

As curator India at the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, I’ve researched the work and lives of traditional Indian goldsmiths in Rajasthan (Bikaner and Jaipur), exploring how they position themselves in the modern global economy in relation to the Mogol- and Rajput court cultures of the past (for some pics of the artwork click here). The book is published by KIT Publishers Amsterdam, Oct 2011.