User:Winnie van den Elshout/Jeroen Windmeijer

Jeroen Windmeijer
Netherlands - Author 1969

Jeroen Windmeijer

General information               

Full name: Jeroen Frederik Antonius Maria Windmeijer

Born: April 19, 1969

Country: the Netherlands

Work

Years active since 2001

Website - Portal  Anthropology

Jeroen Frederik Antonius Maria Windmeijer (Delft, April 19, 1969) is a Dutch author.

Biography
Windmeijer was born in Delft. He grew up in Pijnacker. After completing his high school education, he studied philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and, after completing his propaedeutic year, studied Cultural Anthropology and Sociology of Non-Western Societies at Leiden University. For his graduation research, he lived for six months in a small village of the Bolivian Aymara Indians on the shores of Lake Titicaca, situated at 4,000 meters, on the border of Bolivia and Peru. In 2001 he obtained his PhD at Leiden University and the Amsterdam Center for Documentation for Latin America (CEDLA). He spent fourteen months in the town of Otavalo, located in the highlands of northern Ecuador. This resulted in the dissertation The Valley of the Rising Sun: a study of the exemplary Indians from Otavalo, Ecuador. This dissertation appeared in a popular edition in 2004 under the title Ponchos, pan flutes and ponytails. The Spanish translation - entitled El valle amanecido: un estudio de los indígenas ejemplares de Otavalo, Ecuador - was published in 2016.

Windmeijer debuted in June 2015 at the Leiden publishing house Primavera Pers with the literary thriller The Confessions of Peter. On the occasion of the 170th anniversary of confessional education in Leiden, the mini-thriller A straw letter was published by the Confessional Education Leiden Foundation (SCOL) in a limited edition of 1,500 copies. In 2017 he appeared at the publisher HarperCollins Holland Het Paul Labyrint, followed in 2018 by The Pilgrim Fathers Complot. Both in The Confessions of Peter, The Paul Labyrinth and The Pilgrim Fathers Complot, the main character is archaeologist Peter de Haan, affiliated with Leiden University. In 2019 he published De Offers, the first part of what should become a Latin American trilogy. Part 2, The Visitors (2020), plays in Peru and part 3, The Flood (2021), in Guatemala.

Peter's confessions
In June 2015 he debuted with the literary thriller The Confessions of Peter. According to tradition, the apostle Peter died in Rome, but there is no historical evidence for that. The author is in line with another tradition that states that Jesus' most important student - the patron of the "key city" of Leiden - would have left for England. Central to the book is a correspondence between Judas and Peter, who shines a whole new light on the last hours of Jesus and on the origins of Christianity.

A straw letter
On the occasion of the 170th anniversary of confessional education, the mini-thriller A straw letter was published by the Confessional Education Leiden Foundation (SCOL) in a limited edition of 1,500 copies. Central to the book is the fusion between Roman Catholic education and Christian Protestant education in Leiden - a merger of two religious movements that are met with resistance from some people.

The Paul labyrinth
In March 2017, he published The Paul Labyrinth. Both in The Confessions of Peter and in the Paul Labyrinth, the main character is a Leiden archaeologist Peter de Haan, affiliated with the university there. For centuries, persistent rumors have been circulating in Leiden about an extensive tunnel system under the city. Some tunnels were said to have been dug during the Spanish Siege of Leiden (1573-1574). Hungry residents are said to have dug tunnels beyond the Spanish lines to provide food for the population. In the novel, archaeologists do indeed encounter a tunnel during excavation work. This is the start of a story in which the apostle Paul and his role in the emergence of Christianity are central.

The Pilgrim Fathers Complot
The Pilgrim Fathers Complot was published in August 2018, concluding the so-called "Leiden trilogy". In 2020 it will be 400 years ago that the Pilgrim Fathers left Leiden after an 11-year stay (1609-1620). Via Delfshaven they sailed to Plymouth (England) to depart from there with the ship the Mayflower to America. The Pilgrims were English Puritans who had fled England because they were persecuted by King James I for their faith. The book has 40 chapters - just as many as the years that the people of Israel roamed the desert according to the Bible book of Exodus on their way to the Promised Land. The Freemasons also play an important role in the book, which takes place not only in Leiden, but also in Boston (USA) and in the Egyptian Sinai desert.

The Offers
The Offers (2019) is the first part of the so-called Latin America Trilogy. The story plays on the Bolivian Altiplano. A dead boy is found in a small Indian community on the shores of Lake Titicaca. It seems to have been killed in a ritual way. The Dutch student Luc van Os from Wageningen, who is doing an internship at the agricultural university of Tiahuanaco, and his Indian colleague Nayra Mamani are unintentionally involved in this case.

Publications

 * The valley of the rising sun: a study of the exemplary Indians from Otavalo, Ecuador, Ecuador (2001)


 * Ponchos, pan flutes and ponytails; Native American business travelers and street musicians from Otavalo, Ecuador (2004)


 * El valle amanecido: un estudio de los indígenas ejemplares de Otavalo, Ecuador (2016)


 * The confessions of Petrus (2015)


 * A Straw Letter (2016)


 * The Paul Labyrint (2017)


 * The Pilgrim Fathers Complot (2018)

Extern link

 * Official website
 * Interview Trouw: ‘Eigenlijk zijn gelovigen de eerste complotdenkers’