Ilse Evertse
Van Duvenvoordelaan 82
2274 TB Voorburg, The Hague
Netherlands
phone/Fax: +31 70 38 18834
   Ilse's letter from 16.2.2004

Ilse Lelong Evertse, née Steyn, was born on 10 March 1947 in Stellenbosch. She attended school in Johannesburg and studied languages at Stellenbosch University. Ilse's work experience is wide, diverse and always interesting:

Whatever I'm doing currently - editing English text by non-English academics from around the world - is somehow always the most exciting. After my studies I mostly taught English as second language. If I remember correctly I taught for 5 years and then went off to study French at the Sorbonne, but somehow became side-tracked in Holland where I met up with an old Stellenbosch University friend who became my husband very, very soon. We lived in The Hague for 2 years where I wrote a monthly newsletter for the SABC. Thereafter we returned to Stellenbosch.
I taught another 2 years, then we bought an old house in Herold Street that we had to restore and Jan went off to work for the University's IT department. Money ran out, I had no job and am a VERY bad housekeeper. So, before boredom sent me through the roof, I started writing. And produced the twins at the stage when other people's kids were off to high school - sigh! Kept quite busy doing a thousand and one things like teaching computer skills to university staff, doing text layouts, translations etc. etc. At last went back to the University and worked for the Sport Science department (they truly needed someone with language skills) with great joy for 3 years, but also started editing the English texts of foreign students who could - needless to say - not pay me.

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