Rudy Kousbroek
| Rudy Kousbroek | |
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| Born | Herman Rudolf Kousbroek 11 January 1929 Pematang Siantar, Sumatra, Dutch East Indies |
| Died | 4 April 2010 (aged 81) Leiden, Netherlands |
| Occupation | Poet, translator, writer, essayist |
| Nationality | Dutch |
Herman Rudolf "Rudy" Kousbroek (1 November 1929 – 4 April 2010) was a Dutch poet, translator, writer and first of all essayist. He was a prominent figure in Dutch cultural life between 1950 and 2010 and one of the most outspoken atheists in the Netherlands. In 1975 he was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize for his essays.
His principal work is the book Het Oostindisch kampsyndroom (The East Indian Camp Syndrome), a compilation of critical essays that are in one way or the other related to the Dutch East Indies and clearly show his admiration for Dutch Indo-Eurasian authors like E. du Perron, Tjalie Robinson, Beb Vuyk as well as Indonesian intellectual Sutan Sjahrir.
Rudy Kousbroek was born in Pematang Siantar, on the isle of Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies. The first sixteen years of his life he lived there. During the Japanese occupation he and his family were imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp. After World War II his family repatriated to the Netherlands.
He studied mathematics and physics in Amsterdam and Japanese in Paris. He never finished his studies, but he had thoroughly absorbed the culture of both the sciences and the humanities, what C. P. Snow has called The Two Cultures. Scientific thinking and empiricism remained the core of his world view.
He lived in France for many years but returned to the Netherlands in the early 1970s. He became for some time the moving spirit of the Cultural Supplement of NRC Handelsblad. His range of interests was very broad: he wrote poetry for children, analysed with subtlety human emotions, such as: longing, nostalgia, sexuality, love for cars, love for animals. Indonesian and Indo Eurasian culture and literature as well as the aftermath of colonialism remained a lifelong interest. He has written quite a lot about the visual arts and photography. He advocated a more prominent role of the natural sciences in intellectual discourse and education.
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