Cees Nooteboom obituary

Dutch novelist, poet and travel writer who reported on the Hungarian revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall

The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, who has died aged 92, looked and wrote in his later years like an epitome of the suave and cosmopolitan man of letters. A devoted European, he lived in an elegant 1731 merchant’s house in Amsterdam, but spent every summer on the island of Menorca. Nooteboom published almost 60 books: fiction, poetry and travel writing. Stylish, erudite and reflective, they brought him a shelf of major awards including, in 2009, a career-crowning lifetime honour for Dutch-language writers: the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren.

Yet he remained, as he put it in his 2016 work 533: A Book of Days, “a child of the war, and after that the cold war”. In 1940, he had watched from his family’s apartment in The Hague as nearby Rotterdam burned in air raids. In early 1945, misdirected RAF bombs killed his father during the “hunger winter” in which more than 20,000 people died of starvation in the Netherlands. Nooteboom built his urbanity, and seeming serenity, amid ruin and trauma. “I have not remembered chaos,” he said. “I found my way out of all that in my books.”

Born in The Hague, Nooteboom moved eight times during early childhood as his parents, Hubertus Nooteboom, a businessman, and Johanna Pessers, separated and remarried. The family name means “nut-tree”: hard outside, tasty within, Cees quipped. His Catholic stepfather sent him to severe schools run by Franciscan and Augustinian monks. He rebelled but cherished the Latin and Greek literature they taught him. In the Hilversum bank where he worked after leaving school he secretly read William Faulkner in his cubicle, but the travel bug soon bit hard.

After the war, “Everything in our country was grey, sad, poor,” he recalled. “I felt this great need for the south, for life and for light.” Hitchhiking adventures in Italy and Provence resulted in his debut novel, Philip and the Others (1954). After its success, he moved to Amsterdam and began to write journalism as well.

At short notice (he had 10 minutes to pack) he rushed to Budapest in 1956 to witness, for the newspaper Het Parool, the crushing of Hungary’s revolution by Soviet tanks. The child who had seen Rotterdam blitzed would become a serial eyewitness at European history’s turning-points: Paris in 1968, Berlin in 1989.

But his wanderlust took him farther afield: a 1957 stint as a sailor on a freighter to Suriname helped raise the funds to marry Fanny Lichtveld, his first wife. As reporter and editor, his career flourished: for Elsevier magazine, the daily De Volkskrant, then the upmarket glossy Avenue. The 1963 novel The Knight Has Died showcased the playful, ingenious narrative techniques that marked his fiction. His ambitious and allusive poetry also won plaudits and filled a dozen volumes: poetry, he said, “ventures into unknown territory, much more than the novel does”.

Ceaseless travel, however, came to define his career and his reputation. From the mid-1960s he spent half the year in Menorca, where closely observed natural and social life gave a refuge from history’s storms. Spain and its art became an abiding passion. On its parched mainland plains, this voluntary exile from mild, watery Holland felt at home. “On the inside, I look just like that,” he once said. He divorced in 1964, and for 15 years his partner was the Dutch pop star and actor Liesbeth List. In 2016 he married the photographer Simone Sassen, his longtime partner, whose images enrich several of his works.

His voyages yielded an abundant harvest of books and articles: their locations stretch from Brazil and Bolivia to Tunisia and Iran, as well as his beloved Spain. After a 17-year break, he returned to fiction with the prize-winning Rituals (1980). In his trademark manner it combines immersion in far-flung cultures – in this case Japan’s – with narrative intricacy and a certain melancholy lyricism.

Rituals inaugurated the series of novels that elevated his European, and international, profile. After it came In the Dutch Mountains (1984), The Following Story (1991), All Souls’ Day (1998) and Lost Paradise (2004). His sophisticated artifice as a storyteller did not preclude popular success. The Following Story reached more than half a million readers when chosen as the featured free title, the Boekenweekgeschenk, given away with purchases during Dutch Book Week.

Yet his globe-trotting worldliness did not always go down smoothly at home. Jane Fenoulhet, emerita professor of Dutch studies at University College London and author of a critical study of Nooteboom, Nomadic Literature, notes that he is now read in 38 languages, including Chinese, Korean, Hebrew and Hindi, but that “the Dutch themselves were wary of this cosmopolitan, ironic and meditative writer until … the international recognition he received brought acclaim at home”. On the global stage, Roads to Santiago (1992) proved his signature title: a learned, colourful, digressive journey through Spain in 25 “detours”.

Nooteboom taught in the US at Berkeley and in Berlin, where his dispatches as the Wall fell in 1989 confirmed his talent as a reporter on history’s frontlines. He later told the Guardian that “I started travelling in order to find something to write about, and I succeeded.” In 2002, Nomad’s Hotel (with an English version in 2009) collected highlights from his travelogues.

Tombs, in 2007, mingled cultural memory, global adventures and visual arts in a distinctive blend: his words accompanied 80 images of writers’ graves by Sassen. Later books, such as Letters to Poseidon (2012), have an elegiac, valedictory tone, as his decades-long embrace of Europe and its art becomes a graceful farewell wave. In 2020, he won Spain’s Formentor prize; the citation noted his “consciousness of belonging to the great European cultural tradition”.

However, this supreme upholder of the European ideal saw that it still often failed outsiders. Commenting on the iconic 2015 photos of a drowned two-year-old Syrian refugee, he wrote that “the child was too heavy for Europe”. No writer embodied more eloquently postwar hopes for a shared European home; yet he came to fear that the dream was “broken before it was truly whole”.

He is survived by Sassen.

• Cees (Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria) Nooteboom, writer, born 31 July 1933; died 11 February 2026