Joris Luyendijk
Joris Luyendijk is a non-fiction writer and journalist. A pioneer in innovative journalism, he is currently writing the experimental JLbankingblog about the World of Finance for the Guardian: www.guardian.co.uk/bankingblog. The aim is to take a truly complex issue, in this case finance, and to use modern technology plus anthropological methods to make that issue accessible, interesting and perhaps even entertaining to complete outsiders.
Luyendijk was born in Amsterdam in 1971 and educated as a social scientist in the Netherlands, the US and Egypt. He did anthropological fieldwork in the slums of Cairo and worked as a Middle East correspondent for many years. He eventually became a news correspondent for various Netherlands-based media organizations in the Middle East. He was based in Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. He also reported on the Second Gulf War in Iraq.
His four books each sold extremely well, and picked up the odd prize and one was even translated into a dozen languages. His first book Een goede man slaat soms zijn vrouw (1998, A good man sometimes hits his wife) is about the Egyptian society from a Western observer’s point of view. Another of his books, Het zijn net mensen (2006,They are just like people) is a report of his experiences as a news correspondent in the Middle East, and quickly became a bestseller in the Netherlands. The book has since been translated and published in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Australia, the US, France and Slovenia, and is scheduled to be released in the UK and Lebanon. The title in English is ‘Fit to Print’ (Australia), ‘Hello, Everybody!’ (UK) or ‘People Like Us’ (US).
Joris Luyendijk was the moderator of the first edition of TEDxAmsterdam in 2009. His personal motto is: ‘hope is the fuel that help us drive our cars even further into the swamp.’
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