An autobiography in the third person

Ilse Josepha Lazaroms (she her hers) is a bilingual writer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her debut novel, Duet – a story about new motherhood and the splintering of a relationship set on a houseboat on the Hudson River in New York City – was published with Cossee in 2021. Her next book, Elders (Elsewhere), will be published with Atlas Contact in June 2024. A German translation of Duet came out with KLAK Verlag in March 2024.

Ilse is the recipient of a Tin House nonfiction fellowship (for single parents) and a scholarship for The Unexpected Shape Community with Esmé Weijun Wang, and she was a runner up for the Lighthouse Lit Fest 2020 nonfiction fellowship. She is the founder of Azarel Press and a regular contributor to the Dutch Review of Books, De Groene Amsterdammer and De Correspondent, where she writes about (translated) literature, feminist and queer issues, (single) motherhood and social justice, academia and itinerancy.

She holds an MA in Gender studies from Utrecht University and a PhD in Jewish studies from the European University Institute in Florence. She has held fellowships at Harvard University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Center for Jewish History in New York, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest. Currently, she is a commissioning editor for academic books in the humanities at Amsterdam University Press.

Her academic work – at the intersection of feminist and queer studies and Jewish studies – has been published internationally. In 2015 her book The Grace of Misery: Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile, 1918–1939, about the life of the Jewish writer Joseph Roth, was awarded the Victor Adler State Prize from the Austrian Ministry of Science and Education.

Born and raised in the Netherlands, Ilse has lived in Budapest, London, Jerusalem, Oslo, New York, Florence, Berlin, and Cambridge, MA, and currently lives in Amsterdam with her daughter. Find Ilse at @ilsejosepha on IG and X.

Her creative work has been supported by the Dutch Foundation for Literature, Auteursbond, Amarte Fonds, Tin House, Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Unexpected Shape Community.