Gerrit Kouwenaar (9 August 1923 – 4 September 2014) was a

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

journalist, translator, poet and

prose Prose is a form of written or spoken language that follows the natural flow of speech, uses a language's ordinary grammatical structures, or follows the conventions of formal academic writing. It differs from most traditional poetry, where the ...

writer.

Biography

Kouwenaar was born in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

, North Holland. In the early 1940s, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he wrote various clandestine publications (the first in 1941), and worked for the illegal newspaper '' Parade der Profeten''. He was arrested for this and sentenced to six months' imprisonment. His first collection of poetry appeared in 1949, but he gained wider attention as a member of the Dutch poetry group known as the Vijftigers - the '50s poets'. Kouwenaar worked for magazines and newspapers such as ''

Vrij Nederland ''Vrij Nederland'' (Free Netherlands) is a Dutch magazine, established during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II as an underground newspaper. It has since grown into a magazine. The originally weekly and now monthly magazi ...

'', ''

De Waarheid ''De Waarheid'' (literally 'The Truth') was the newspaper of the Communist Party of the Netherlands. It originated in 1940 under the German occupation German-occupied Europe refers to the sovereign countries of Europe which were wholly or part ...

'', and ''

Het Vrije Volk ''Het Vrije Volk'' was a Dutch social-democratic daily newspaper. It was the successor, after World War II, of the socialist daily '' Het Volk''. The paper appeared legally 1 March 1945 in Eindhoven. From 28 January 1946, all subdivisions of the ...

''. Kouwenaar was awarded the

Martinus Nijhoff Martinus Nijhoff (20 April 1894, in The Hague – 26 January 1953, in The Hague) was a Dutch poet and essayist. He studied literature in Amsterdam and law in Utrecht. His debut was made in 1916 with his volume ''De wandelaar'' ("The wanderer"). F ...

Prize in 1967 for his translation work. In 1970, he was given the P. C. Hooft Award. Kouwenaar later won the 1989 Dutch Literature Prize. In 2009, the Society of Dutch Literature named Kouwenaar the recipient of its annual honor. His last published work was released on 9 August 2008, Kouwenaar's eighty-fifth birthday. Gerrit Kouwenaar's older brother was the painter and poet David Kouwenaar (1921–2011). Kouwenaar died on 4 September 2014 in Amsterdam, aged 91.

References

External links

Gerrit Kouwenaar
at the

Digital Library for Dutch Literature The Digital Library for Dutch Literature (Dutch: Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren or DBNL) is a website (showing the abbreviation as dbnl) about Dutch language and Dutch literature. It contains thousands of literary texts, second ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kouwenaar, Gerrit 1923 births 2014 deaths Dutch resistance members Dutch journalists Dutch male poets Dutch translators English–Dutch translators German–Dutch translators Writers from Amsterdam Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren winners P. C. Hooft Award winners 20th-century translators 20th-century Dutch poets 20th-century Dutch male writers