About us

De Bezige Bij - The Busy Bee - is one of the most distinguished literary publishing houses of The Netherlands.
The history goes back to World War II, when the house was part of the resistance, publishing and distributing poetry and novels. After the war the house continued as a writer’s cooperative and was named The Busy Bee, after the resistance nickname of its founder.
In the decades that followed one of the best and most prestigious literary lists was built. The very best of Dutch, Flemish and international literature: Mulisch, Claus, Hermans but also Beckett, Borges, Brodsky, Bukowski, Camus, Hesse, Joyce, Kerouac, Kosinski, Lowry, Nabokov, Pavese, Plath, Proust, Queneau, Salinger, Sartre, Woolf.

This impressive backlist is still there, but today accompanied by Esther Freud, Graham Swift, Susan Sontag, A.M. Homes, Anne Michaels, John Irving, Donna Tartt, John Bayley, Janet Fitch, Karen Armstrong, Caryl Phillips, Kirsty Gunn, Mark Danielewski, Mary Karr, Oscar Hijuelos, Kent Haruf, Judith Thurman, Lori Lansens, Moses Isegawa, Alexandra Fuller, Siri Hustvedt, Karin Slaughter, Alice Sebold, Elisabeth Rosner, Jacqui Lofthouse, Michel Quint, Laure Adler, Guy Goffette, Gil Courtemanche, Christophe Dufossé and many more, and of course many great Dutch novelists like Harry Mulisch, Hugo Claus, Leon de Winter, Jessica Durlacher, Erwin Mortier, Oscar van den Boogaard, Kees van Beijnum, Allard Schröder and poets like Remco Campert and Gerrit Komrij.








De Bezige Bij has three imprints:

  1. Cargo: focusing on literary thrillers and fiction, with a strong emphasis on Anglophone literature.
  2. Thomas Rap: a former independent publishing house with a wayward style of publishing. From cabaret books to a sports library and from talented debuting novelists and poets to publications by Dutch most famous columnists.
  3. Zoem: publishing audio books by authors from our rich backlist.
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