Cees Nooteboom

Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria Nooteboom was born in The Hague on 31 July 1933. In a 2006 interview with The Guardian he said he had no childhood memories until the German invasion of May 1940, when the family watched the glow of Rotterdam burning on the horizon. His father was killed in 1945 when Allied bombers mistakenly levelled the Bezuidenhout residential district of The Hague. His mother remarried in 1948, and his Catholic stepfather sent him to religious boarding schools.

He attended several secondary schools, including a Franciscan school in Venray and the Augustinianum, run by Augustinians, in Eindhoven. Dutch sources say he was repeatedly sent away as a troublemaker. He completed his secondary education at an evening school in Utrecht. He did not attend university, but later received honorary doctorates from universities in Brussels, Radboud University Nijmegen (2006), the Free University of Berlin (2008) and University College London (2019).

After a first job at a bank in Hilversum in 1951, he was rejected for military service and from 1953 travelled through Europe, writing the first chapter of his debut novel on the road. Philip en de anderen (Philip and the Others) appeared in the mid-1950s and won the first Anne Frank Prize. In 1956 he reported on the Hungarian uprising for Het Parool. He wrote travel pieces for Elsevier (1957 to 1960), worked at de Volkskrant from 1961 and became travel editor of Avenue in 1967.

After De ridder is gestorven (1963) he published no novel for nearly two decades, concentrating on poetry and travel writing. Rituelen (Rituals, 1980) won the Ferdinand Bordewijk Prize and the Pegasus Prize and was his first book in English. The Following Story (1991) won the Aristeion Prize and made him an international name, especially in Germany. Later novels included All Souls' Day (1998), Lost Paradise (2004) and The Foxes Come at Night (2009). His travel books included Roads to Santiago, Nomad's Hotel, Berlijn 1989/2009 and Scheepsjournaal (2010). His work was translated into more than thirty languages, and he also translated Ted Hughes, Czesław Miłosz, Brendan Behan and Seán O'Casey into Dutch.

In 1957 he worked as a sailor on a freighter to Suriname to ask for the hand of Fanny Lichtveld, daughter of the Surinamese minister Frans Lichtveld and niece of the writer Albert Helman. They married in New York in 1957 and divorced in 1964. He then had a relationship with the singer Liesbeth List, writing lyrics for her between 1965 and 1979. In 1979 he met the photographer Simone Sassen, who became his life partner; they married in 2016. He lived in Amsterdam from 1970, spent long periods in Berlin, and divided much of the year with a home in Sant Lluís, Menorca. No children are publicly documented.

Nooteboom was a committed European with a lifelong fascination for the continent's history and culture, a theme that runs through his travel books and his essays on European identity. In 2016 he was among the European writers who addressed letters to Britain in The Guardian ahead of the Brexit referendum. He spoke publicly about religion, including a 1982 Dutch television interview on faith, and his novels return again and again to memory, time and the fragments that make up a life.

He is remembered as one of the most translated Dutch writers and a major literary figure of postwar Europe. The Dutch Foundation for Literature called him an erudite and diplomatic representative of Dutch letters abroad, notably at the 1993 Frankfurt Book Fair. His Roads to Santiago inspired musical works by Spanish and Dutch composers, including Benet Casablancas's Six Glosses (2010). His novels are known for nested frame stories in which separate narratives in different styles gradually merge.

Anne Frank Prize (1957); Poetry Prize of the City of Amsterdam (1960, 1965); Jan Campert Prize (1978); Ferdinand Bordewijk Prize (1981); Pegasus Prize (1982); Multatuli Prize (1985); Constantijn Huygens Prize (1992); Aristeion Prize (1993); Goethe Prize (2002); Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2002); P.C. Hooft Award (2004); Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren (2009, presented by King Albert II of Belgium); Gouden Uil (2010); Mondello Prize (2017); Premio Formentor de las Letras (2020); Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2020). He was a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

Rituals was adapted for the screen by director Herbert Curiël, with Derek de Lint and Thom Hoffman. On 24 July 2005 he was the guest on the long-form VPRO television interview programme Zomergasten. A 1975 travel essay from New York, collected in De zucht naar het Westen, described the then-new World Trade Center towers as strangely vulnerable, a passage widely recalled after 2001. His appearances at the Hay Festival, the Royal Society of Literature and the London Review Bookshop are preserved on video.

Liesbeth List, his partner from 1965 to 1979, later said she had found him very dominant, and in an interview on Jeroen Pauw's television programme Het laatste woord she said that he had hit her. Nooteboom's response, if any, is not documented in the sources used here.

Cees Nooteboom died on 11 February 2026 at his home in Sant Lluís, Menorca, aged 92. His publisher De Bezige Bij said he had passed away very peacefully on his beloved island, in a statement issued on behalf of his wife, Simone Sassen. A cause of death was not made public. His death drew tributes across Europe, including from the Dutch royal couple.