Jan Hein Donner
| Jan Hein Donner | |
|---|---|
Donner at the national championship in 1978
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| Full name | Johannes Hendrikus (Hein) Donner |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Born |
July 6, 1927 The Hague |
| Died | November 27, 1988 (aged 61) |
| Title | Grandmaster (1959) |
| Peak rating | 2500 (July 1971) |
Johannes Hendrikus (Hein) Donner (July 6, 1927 – November 27, 1988) was a Dutch chess grandmaster (GM) and writer. Donner was born in The Hague and won the Dutch Championship in 1954, 1957, and 1958. FIDE, the World Chess Federation, awarded him the GM title in 1959. He played for the Netherlands in the Chess Olympiads 11 times (1950–1954, 1958–1962, 1968, 1972–1978). He was the uncle of the former Dutch Minister of Social Affairs and Employment, Piet Hein Donner.
On August 24, 1983 Donner suffered a stroke, which he wrote happened "just in time, because when you are 56 you do not play chess as well as you did when you were 26". After surviving the stroke, he went to live in Vreugdehof, which he described as "a kind of nursing-home". He was unable to walk, but had learned to type with one finger, and wrote for NRC Handelsblad and Schaaknieuws.
Donner was also a chess columnist and writer. He was famous for his outspoken and often outrageous columns about subjects such as women, politics, and fellow Dutch Grandmaster Lodewijk Prins, whom Donner claimed "cannot tell a knight from a bishop".
In 1987, the book De Koning ("The King") was published, which contained 162 of his chess columns, all but the last written between 1950 and 1983, collected by Tim Krabbé and Max Pam. Also in 1987, Donner received the Henriёtte Roland-Holst Prize, one of the Netherlands' most prestigious literary awards, for Na mijn dood geschreven ("Written after my death"), a selection from the mini-columns he had written for NRC Handelsblad. On November 27, 1988, Donner died of a gastric hemorrhage. He is buried at Zorgvlied cemetery.
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