Willem van Toorn

The Nederlands, 1935

born in Amsterdam. Since 1959, when his debut The explosion, a novella, appeared, he has published a large number of novels and collections of short stories, poems and essays, in which the landscape often plays an important role. One of his best known novels in Holland is De rivier (The River, 1999), which is situated in Amsterdam during the german occupation in the Second World War and in the countryside from which his parents came to the city during the economic crisis of the thirties. His latest publications are De hofreis (The Voyage to the Court, poems 2009) and De geur van gedroogde appels (The Smell of Dried Apples, short stories 2010). Van Toorn is also a translator, a.o. of the poetry of Cesare Pavese and Franco Loi from the Italian, of prose of John Updike, E.L. Doctorow and Christopher Isherwood from the English, and of Franz Kafka’s prose from the German.