Beb Vuyk

Beb Vuyk
Beb Vuyk, famous Indo author, 1928.
Born	Elizabeth Vuijk (1905-02-11)February 11, 1905 Rotterdam, Netherlands
Died	August 24, 1991(1991-08-24) (aged 86) Blaricum, Netherlands
Occupation	Author, journalist
Nationality	Dutch

Elizabeth (Beb) Vuyk (born Rotterdam, February 11, 1905 – died Blaricum, August 24, 1991) was a Dutch writer of Indo (Eurasian) descent. Her Indo father was born in the Dutch East Indies and had a mother from Madura, but was ‘repatriated’ to the Netherlands on a very young age. She married into a typically Calvinist Dutch family and lived in the port city of Rotterdam. Vuyk grew up in the Netherlands and went to her father’s land of birth in 1929 at the age of 24. 3 years later she married Fernand de Willigen, a native born Indo (Dutch father and Ambonese mother) that worked in the oil and tea plantations throughout the Indies. They had 2 sons, both born in the Dutch East Indies.

In the Dutch East Indies she sympathised with the Indies independence movement and befriended Indonesian intellectual Sutan Sjahrir via their common friend the famous author E. du Perron. During World War II she was captive in a Japanese concentration camp. An account of these years named 'Kampdagboeken' was the last book she ever published in 1989.

Vuyk is considered a brilliant literary composer and won numerous awards throughout her career, among them the 1973 Constantijn Huygens Prize. Much of her literary work is auto-biographical and clearly pinpoints the racial relationships in the colonial Dutch East Indies and the paradoxes of the early post-colonial and revolutionary years.

One of her critically acclaimed books is ‘Laatste huis van de wereld’ (Last house in the world), 1939, about intense adventure in primitive circumstances, but also fearful hardship in the pre-World War II Indies. The book was inspired by her own experiences living in the South Moluccas and is sometimes compared to the writings of the great female Indo author Maria Dermoût, who also lived in the Moluccas. Vuyk herself was quite outspoken about what she considered a clear distinction between her own rugged experience and the more elite experience of Dermoût.