Jozef Deleu

Jozef Hugo Maria Deleu was born on 20 April 1937 in Roeselare, West Flanders, the youngest of seven children in a farming family. His father, Louis, had been born in Lille in 1897 and gave up French nationality to become Belgian, and Deleu later spoke openly of his attraction to the French language. Critics linked the melancholy of his writing to the rural, Jansenist-tinged West Flemish world of his childhood.

He trained at the teacher training college in Torhout and from 1956 to 1970 was a primary school teacher, first at the Sint-Jozefscollege in Mouscron and then at the Sint-Aloysiuscollege in Menen. During his military service he was an officer, an experience he later drew on in his prose.

The idea for a magazine came from the writer Andre Demedts, who approached the nineteen-year-old Deleu at a 1956 meeting of the Committee for French Flanders. The first issue of Ons Erfdeel (Our Heritage) appeared in 1957 in 250 copies. Deleu widened its scope to the whole Dutch-language area and built a network of contributors in Belgium and the Netherlands; by 1982 its circulation stood at 10,000.

In 1970 he gave up teaching and the magazine passed to the independent Flemish-Dutch Ons Erfdeel Foundation, with Deleu as managing director, based next to his home in Rekkem on the Belgian-French border. From there he reached beyond the language border with Septentrion for French speakers in 1972, the bilingual yearbook De Franse Nederlanden / Les Pays-Bas Francais in 1976 and The Low Countries for the English-speaking world in 1993. He handed over to Luc Devoldere in 2002. Between 1969 and 1975 he also helped lay the foundations of the first Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging.

His literary debut was the novella De ontmoeting (1962), followed by the poetry collection Schaduwlopen (1963). His collected poems, Ondoorgrond. Gedichten 1963-2019, were published by the Poeziecentrum in 2019, followed by two volumes of miniatures, Geluiden voor de laatste dag (2021) and Het paard van mijn vader (2023). His work was translated into French, German, English, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian.

From 1976 he compiled the Groot Gezinsverzenboek, later the Groot Verzenboek, which VRT described as the longest-running poetry anthology in the Low Countries. In 2003 he founded Het liegend konijn, a magazine of previously unpublished poetry from Flanders and the Netherlands, choosing every poem himself until the final issue in October 2025.

He was also known for speeches on cultural policy, collected under the title De pleinvrees der kanunniken (1987), in which he criticised the commercialisation of culture, a narrow Flemish nationalism and the complacency of a prosperous new Flemish elite. From 2005 he sat as an independent member of the board of the public broadcaster VRT, where he defended its English, German and French newsrooms.

Deleu lived and worked for most of his life in Rekkem, a village in the city of Menen on the French border, and liked to say that the border lay at the end of his garden. "Someone who lives on the border feels he belongs to this side, but always to the other side too," he said. He was married to Annemarie Deblaere, with whom he shared the Andre Demedts Prize in 1974, and they had three children. He declined the noble title of baron.

Jozef Deleu died on Wednesday 21 October 2026 in Rekkem, aged 89. The cause of death was not made public. His death was announced on Facebook by de lage landen, the successor to Ons Erfdeel, which called him one of the most influential advocates of the Dutch language and culture and sent its thoughts to his wife Annemarie, his children and grandchildren.

The city of Menen, where he had been the first honorary citizen, flew its flags at half mast on public buildings and opened a book of condolence at its library until 5 November. Belgian deputy prime minister Frank Vandenbroucke said that Flanders had lost a remarkable and endearing man who had made an exceptional contribution to Flemish poetry. De Morgen described him as one of the most important bridge-builders between Flanders and the Netherlands.

Deleu turned a small magazine for young readers in the Flemish borderlands into a respected Flemish-Dutch cultural institution that presented the culture of the Low Countries in Dutch, French and English. Ghent University gave him an honorary doctorate in 1994 as an unofficial ambassador of the Dutch language and culture. Among many honours he received the Prize of the Flemish Government (2002), the Ark Prize of the Free Word (2020) and the first Taalpenning of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature (2023), and he was a Commander of the Order of Orange-Nassau and a Grand Officer of the Order of Leopold. Through the Groot Verzenboek and Het liegend konijn, he brought poetry to a wide public and gave many young poets their first platform.