Hans Koning
| Hans Koning | |
|---|---|
Hans Koning
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| Born |
July 12, 1921 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Died | April 13, 2007 (aged 85) |
| Occupation | Writer and journalist |
Hans Koning (born Hans Koningsberger) (July 12, 1921 – April 13, 2007), author of over 40 fiction and non-fiction books, was also a prolific journalist, contributing for almost 60 years to many periodicals including The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Harper's, The New Yorker, and De Groene Amsterdammer.
Born in Amsterdam in 1921 to Elisabeth van Collem (daughter of socialist poet ) and David Königsberger, he was educated at the University of Amsterdam 1939-41, the University of Zurich 1941-43, and the Sorbonne in 1946.
Escaping the occupied Netherlands with the Resistance (he was a wearer of the Dutch Resistance Cross), he was one of the youngest sergeants in the British Army, 7 Troop, 4 Commando, working as an interpreter during the allied occupation of Germany at the end of the war.
As an editor of De Groene Amsterdammer, a Dutch weekly, 1947–50, he was invited to run a cultural program on Radio Jakarta, Indonesia which he did from 1950-51. It was after this that he came by freighter to the United States. His first novel, The Affair, was published in 1958. He also began writing non-fiction, including several travel books, including Love and Hate in China (1966).
During the Vietnam War he turned his attention to protest, helping to found the still-active ‘RESIST’ organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Noam Chomsky among others.
For the next thirty years he wrote fiction and non-fiction and was a two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for creative writers, for fiction. Four of his novels were made into films: A Walk with Love and Death, which was Anjelica Huston’s first film, directed by her father, John Huston, The Revolutionary, starring Jon Voight, Death of a Schoolboy, for the BBC London, and The Petersburg-Cannes Express.
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