For my first post on Europa SF I had the plan to sum up all available stories and books by authors originally writing in Dutch, that have been translated in English. I must confess that I could not find many titles. For some reason those who write in Dutch don’t seem to have a drive to publish in the lingua franca of SF and Fantasy. Once, when books were things you could hold in your hands, at least some of the SF and Fantasy books in Dutch were translated in English. But since the decline of the paper book, writers probably had other concerns than having their work translated all over the world.
Last year I learned about the way a small Belgian publisher, Verschijnsel, formerly known as Babel-SF, hopes to serve the international market. They will not develop an e-book publishing division. Instead they decided to help their authors to publish via Smashwords. To my joy they started off with a few titles in English. And to promote their authors several stories are available as free downloads. Some writers apparently still have been busy translating some of their work.
The first question that came to my mind was how the world could discover the work of the Dutch speaking authors in the enormous pile of titles that have been published via Smashwords, the proverbial needle in the haystack. I asked this question on many a forum, but nobody seemed to bother. So I decided to build a little WordPress site to list free English stories by Dutch authors. This is of course only the start; the site will definitely expand. But at this stage I wonder what the European community thinks of this approach. Please let me know in your comments on this post.
The site is called “A Dutch Treat”. The address is: www.adutchtreat.nl
