Background

Hans Maarten van den Brink was born in 1956 in Oegstgeest, Netherlands. He is the eldest of three sons of a German mother and Dutch father, the latter a psychologist at a psychiatric institution who left the family when Hans was ten years old.

Education

Hans Maarten van den Brink studied at the University of Leiden.

Career

Hans Maarten van den Brink worked as a journalist for the Leiden University magazine Mare and then for thirteen years for the leading newspaper NRC Handelsblad from 1982 to 1995, including as an art editor, chief reporter and correspondent in Washington, United States and Madrid, Spain. After that, in 1998 he took the post of editor-in-chief of the Dutch television station VPRO, two years director of the Witte de With arts center.

Hans Maarten is vice-president of the Dutch Literature Foundation, editor of De Gids, the oldest literary magazine in the Netherlands. He has also worked as director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Witte de With in Rotterdam. He has been a freelance editor for the television-art journal Bonanza from 2001 to 2002, a cultural and political columnist for the weekly Vrij Nederland from 2002 to 2006. Between 2006 and 2015 Van den Brink was director of the Media Fund and board member of various cultural institutions. He lives and works in Amsterdam.

As the author, Hans Maarten van den Brink wrote his first novel Reis naar de West in 1986. His novel, De Vooruitgang (The Progress), appeared in 1993 and was based on a real event, the enigmatic murder of three young bullfighters in a small Spanish village. With the novel Over het water, that was published in 1998 and translated by Paul Vincent as On the Water in 2001, he established his name as a writer not only nationally but also internationally. The novel Hart van glas (Heart of Glass), that was published in 1999, about a project developer who is simultaneously entangled in a fatal love and a ditto building project, contains strong criticism of Dutch society at the end of the last century, but also of the idea that utopian architecture could change this. The book has been translated into French and Italian. With the exception of a few short stories, among others in the magazine De Gids, Van den Brink no longer wrote fiction until he retired as director of the Media Fund in 2015 and his novel Dijk came out. His most recent book Aurora Schrijft was published in 2020.

Achievements

• Hans Maarten van den Brink is a prolific author. His works have been translated into French, German, and Spanish. His On the Water has been nominated for the Libris Literatuur Prijs, the AKO Prize, Generale Bank Prize, the Prix Femina, the Prix Medicis and awarded the Euregio Prize. The book was translated into fourteen languages and included in the funds of prestigious publishers such as Gallimard, Hanser, Faber & Faber and Grove/Atlantic Monthly. It was the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 2002. It has been reprinted annually since its first publication in 1998 and is now considered a classic in Dutch literature.
  
  Hans Maarten's Dijk is now also included in the programmes of the French Gallimard and the Israeli Sifriat Poalim.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Reizigers bij een herberg

    (Dutch Edition)

    2003
  • On the Water 1998
  • Dijk 2015
  • Spanien mit Leib und Seele 2003
  • De dertig dagen van Sint Isidoor 1994
  • Aurora Schrijft 2020
  • Het ontbijtbuffet en andere verhalen 2018
  • Nieuwe lusten 2016
  • Koning Wilders: een wintersprookje 2017

Connections

Hans Maarten van den Brink is married to Antoinette Hoes and has three children from his first marriage.

Wife:

Antoinette Hoes

Antoinette Hoes is an expert in the field of online media and communications. She is head of a strategy at Tribal DDB Amsterdam, delivering the best thinking to both the creative and the business side of the company. She has worked as a strategy director for various advertising agencies, consulted on business development and IT; and been a consultant for innovation within the creative industry. She lectures on new media management and interactive advertising at the Hogeschool Utrecht and at Beeckestijn Business School. She is also on the advisory council of Virtueel Platform, an industry group that promotes Dutch e-culture and is active in international new media culture networks.