Lizzy van Leeuwen

Elisabeth Margaretha van Leeuwen, known as Lizzy, was born in The Hague in 1958. Her mother came from an Indisch family; as a teenager she had been held in a Japanese internment camp in the Dutch East Indies and in 1946 travelled to the Netherlands on the repatriation ship Oranje with her parents, who had already divorced. Her father was, in her words, simply a Dutchman from Rotterdam. Van Leeuwen said she had not fully realised as a child that she was an Indo.

The family moved to Noordwijkerhout, a small village on the Dutch coast. She studied law in Groningen and later trained as a cultural anthropologist, earning her doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in 2005.

After her law studies Van Leeuwen joined the municipality of Amsterdam as a lawyer in 1985. She then moved into anthropology and in the 1990s lived in Indonesia to study the political culture and the new wealthy elite of Jakarta during the Suharto years. That research produced Airconditioned Lifestyles: nieuwe rijken in Jakarta (1997) and her doctoral thesis Lost in Mall: An Ethnography of Middle Class Jakarta in the 1990s (University of Amsterdam, 2005), which appeared in a revised English edition in 2011.

Until 2008 she worked at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam as a postdoctoral historical and ethnological researcher on the project Bringing History Home, led with the historian Gert Oostindie, studying how postwar identity politics among postcolonial migrants interacted with Dutch society. The result was Ons Indisch erfgoed: zestig jaar strijd om cultuur en identiteit (2008), a critical account of how Indisch culture and the so-called Indisch community were shaped after the war; an updated edition appeared in 2024.

As a publicist she wrote for De Groene Amsterdammer on Indonesia, colonial history and Dutch society. Her 2009 essay on the Indisch family background of Geert Wilders, arguing that politics can have colonial roots, provoked strong reactions. Her later books were De hanenbalken: zelfmoord op het platteland (Atlas Contact, 2014), on suicide among farmers; Indra: een wajangleven (2020), a biography of the Javanese-born dancer Leo Broekveldt, who performed as Indra Kamadjojo; Volksvreemd vermaak (2023), on performers from the East and West Indies on Dutch stages before and during the German occupation; and Indehoy! Geschiedenis van seks in Indie 1602-1942 (April 2026), published by Walburg Pers and reviewed in NRC. She discussed Indehoy! on Leiden University's postcolonial podcast in October 2026.

In the 2021 general election she was eighth on the candidate list of the party Splinter, at the invitation of its founder Femke Merel van Kooten, a role she described as that of a list supporter with no political ambition.

Van Leeuwen lived in Amsterdam for many years. In a 2026 interview with Het Parool she said she loved the people of Amsterdam but felt less at home there as the city changed, and that her mother and her daughter lived nearby in Amsterdam Oost. She described Indonesia, where she had family and had travelled widely, as a place where she felt at home, and she enjoyed speaking Indonesian. Her mother's account of being harassed in a Hague boarding house shortly after arriving in 1946, told to her only when her mother was in her nineties, prompted her to write Indehoy!

Lizzy van Leeuwen died on Tuesday 13 October 2026. Her age was 67 or 68; her exact date of birth has not been published. The place and cause of death have not been made public.

Her publisher, Walburg Pers, announced her death on 16 October 2026. On behalf of the publishing house, Jan-Peter Wissink and May Meurs wrote that they had learned of it with emotion, calling her a passionate author, a talented writer, a sharp thinker and a thorough researcher with great knowledge of Indonesia, and above all a beloved person. Funeral arrangements were not publicly reported.

Van Leeuwen's work helped open up Dutch debate on the postcolonial experience of Indisch people and on the cultural and intimate history of colonialism, beyond the better known history of war and violence. Ons Indisch erfgoed remains a standard, if contested, reference on the politics of Indisch identity in the Netherlands, while Indehoy!, published six months before her death, was one of the first Dutch-language histories of sexuality in the colonial Indies. Her biography of Leo Broekveldt and her study of colonial performers on wartime Dutch stages recovered largely forgotten chapters of Dutch cultural history.