Adriaan van Dis
| Adriaan van Dis | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
16 December 1946 Bergen aan Zee |
| Nationality | Dutch |
| Genre | Novella Novel |
| Website | |
| www |
|
Adriaan van Dis (Bergen aan Zee, 16 December 1946) is a Dutch author, residing in France. Van Dis debuted in 1983 with the novella Nathan Sid. In 1995 his book Indische Duinen (My Father's War), which in its narrative is a follow up to his debut novella, was also awarded several prestigious literary awards.
He is also known as the host of his own award winning television talkshow named Hier is... Adriaan van Dis, that lasted from 1983 to 1992 and several successful award winning television documentaries.
With the publication of his Indies inspired compilation book De Indie boeken (The Indies books) in 2012, Van Dis establishes himself as one of the most significant second generation authors of Dutch Indies literature.
His father was born in the Dutch East Indies to Dutch parents and his mother a farmer's daughter from Breda who had met each other in the Dutch East Indies after the War. By then his mother already had three daughters from her first marriage to a Royal Dutch East Indies Army KNIL officer of Indo-European descent. His father had been married before as well, in the East Indies. His family had been heavily affected by the Second World War and the subsequent Indonesian revolution.
As a survivor of the Junyo Maru disaster, which had been mistakenly torpedoed by the British, his father performed forced labour as a POW on the Pakan Baroe railroad on Sumatra. Adriaan van Dis's mother's first husband was a resistance fighter and was decapitated during the Japanese occupation (1942–1945). His mother ended up in a Japanese internment camp along with her 3 young daughters.
Adriaan, born after the war, in the Netherlands, felt like an outsider in his own family because he was the only white child and had no direct history in the Indies or of the war. His environment contributed to this sense of loneliness. Bergen aan Zee was home to many people who had come from the Dutch East Indies and Adriaan grew up in a house that he shared with four repatriated families of mostly Indo-European descent.
Adriaan's parents were unable to get married. While his father's marriage had been disbanded under Islamic law, that divorce had no legal validity in the Netherlands. Nobody was allowed to know this, and so, for the sake of the outside world, Adriaan took on his father's surname: Mulder. However, officially his surname remained his mother's: Van Dis. When Adriaan went to college, he actually began using his real name. Later in life while working on his autobiographic novels Van Dis discovered that out of spite his fathers family hid the fact that his father was in fact already a widower.
...
Wikipedia