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He has published Egypt. A Good Man Sometimes Hits his Wife (1997) and The Corner of the Veil (2001). In Hello Everybody! (Profile, 2010) he examines how journalists and correspondents really work, rather than how they claim to work. This Cannot Be True: Among Bankers (2015), based on blogs he wrote for The Guardian, Luyendijk provides an anthropological perspective on the financial world.

In 2002 he was awarded the Golden Pen, the Dutch prize for journalism, and in 2007 the NS Publieksprijs for Hello Everybody!.

Prizes

Joris Luyendijk

It is the product of a two-year collaboration between Luyendijk and The Guardian, during which he conducted over two hundred interviews with those who work in the City of London, Europe’s financial capital. Written for a broad audience, it asks straightforwardly: what happened?And, even more importantly: could it happen again? Luyendijk is no financial expert, which makes his efforts to decipher the workings of the closed world of finance in simple terms all the more impressive. He pulls no punches and the story he tells is nuanced, entertaining, poignant, convincing and, yes, profoundly frightening.Luyendijk first explores the problems that define Planet Finance, and then goes on to evaluate potential solutions. He starts with layman’s questions, before delving deeper and deeper into more complex activities of the financial sector, painting a comprehensive yet comprehen- sible picture of the financial world, from bankers and insurance brokers to wealth managers; from front- to back-offices.Luyendijk sees a large bank not as a single entity but as ‘an archipelago amidst the fog’. Having described how the City and its corporations are structured, he explores their culture by bringing to the fore various types of interviewee, from ‘tooth grinders’ to ‘bubble bankers’, laying bare their inner struggles. The amorality that shapes financial dynamics is chillingly revealed in these interviews.The author’s mood gradually changes. At first he is simply curious, but later chapters are dominated by outright anger and disbelief. The main problem facing post-2008 societies is that ‘the underlying structure of the financial world remains intact’. However reprehensible the behaviour of some individual bankers, it is the perversity of the system that needs to be addressed.

With the curiosity of an ethnologist, Joris Luyendijk explores the parallel world of the London banker. He tells of an archipelago shrouded in mist, where mercenaries ply their trade.

Horrifying portrait of bankers. Free of banker bashing and clichés. Even bankers turn out to be almost human, capable of humour and introspection – which makes this portrait all the more damning.

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Non-Fiction

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Dit kan niet waar zijn

One of the few upsides to the financial crisis has been the wealth of books published about its causes and consequences. They include some excellent anthropological accounts, of which Luyendijk’s bestseller is among the most valuable.

Swimming with Sharks

After studying Arabic in Amsterdam, Joris Luyendijk went to Cairo for a year’s further studies. He wanted to investigate whether Islam and democracy were mutually exclusive and whether it was possible for a Westerner to integrate in an Islamic culture. He moved into a run-down flat in a working class neighbourhood and enrolled at the university. He soon found a place in a shilla, a circle of friends at the university. Although initially happy with the acceptance of Imad the Fundamentalist, Ali the Worrier, Muhammad the Feminist, Hazem the Liberal and the others, Luyendijk soon began to clash with his friends about their Islamic ideas, in particular their homophobia, their anti-Semitism and their views on the position of women. As the year advanced, he wrestled increasingly with the problem as to whether one can be friends with those whose ideas are objectionable.The numerous sparkling dialogues between Luyendijk and his fellow students make Een goede man slaat soms zijn vrouw a magnificent, hilarious and honest book about the impossibility of integrating in an Islamic society.

Joris Luyendijk’s book is one of the best books about Egypt to have appeared in years.

Luyendijk is a witty, intelligent and expert writer who describes life in Egypt with compassion.

Egypte: Een Goede Man Slaat Som

When Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, was shot dead in November 1995, Egyptian opposition newspapers reacted jubilantly with headlines like ‘Rabin in Hell’ and ‘One More Dead Jew’. Joris Luyendijk’s Egyptian friends at the University of Cairo also spoke in terms of ‘a celebration’, ‘justice’ and ‘just punishment from Allah’. Luyendijk and a Western friend were shocked by these reactions but went against their better judgement by trying to sympathise. ‘We decided that if we had lost family members in a war with Israel, we might think that way too. What are you supposed to do? Find a complete new set of friends?’

Egypt

No, we don’t, says Joris Luyendijk in Almost Human In fact we know very little about the Middle East, because all Arab countries are dictatorships, countries without opinion polls or freedom of the press, countries where every official body takes orders from the single monster called dictatorship. Dictators survive thanks to a lack of transparency, which makes reliable journalism impossible.Luyendijk spent five years working as a correspondent, first in Cairo, then Beirut, then East Jerusalem. He has written for the two most important Dutch newspapers and worked as a reporter for The Netherlands’ most authoritative television news programme.The main conclusion of this provocative book is that our image of the Middle East is coloured by all kinds of filters. One of the most important of these, for the written press as well as the visual media, is television. The big American television networks decide the news agenda and newspaper journalists tend to run along behind them, trying to keep up. Since the first law of television is ‘no pictures, no story’, very many stories never get told.Another filter is language. The story of the Middle East is told in words borrowed from western democracies, words like ‘elections’, ‘parliament’, ‘political parties’, but these terms are simply meaningless in a dictatorship. In Israel yet other filters apply; correspondents there encounter an extremely well-oiled propaganda machine. Luyendijk gives several disconcerting examples.

Joris Luyendijk has written an almost philosophical reportage about the shortcomings of journalism. He backs up his arguments briskly and with verve, using numerous vivid anecdotes.

The picture that Luyendijk sketches is sombre: reliable journalism is simply impossible in dictatorships like those of the Middle East. But he describes all this very enjoyably, with humour, extremely accessibly, and without sparing himself. Journalists ought more often to admit there are things they do not know, Luyendijk says, rather than bluffing or giving the impression that, on the basis of their own observations, they can say exactly how things stand.More than just an analysis of the Middle East, Hello Everybody! is a razor-sharp analysis of western media. This makes it an important book, essential reading not only for journalists but for all newspaper readers and television viewers who assume that the information they receive is truly objective.

Luyendijk is a good observer; his style is impossible to fault and, happily, he is not lacking in self-mockery.

For journalists this dazzling book is a must, and no less so for the television viewer, radio listener and newspaper reader.

Het zijn net mensen

How many followers does Osama Bin Laden have in the Arab world? What do Muslims think about equality between men and women? And what about democracy? Western media reports give the impression – to take the first question only – that Bin Laden has a large worldwide following. But is this an accurate picture? Do we really know what is going on in the Arab world?

Hello Everybody!

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