About Geert van der Kolk
Intro
Geert van der Kolk was born in a post-war reconstruction district in Velsen-Noord. He attended Gymnasium (latin school) in Apeldoorn and read history at Utrecht University. He also studied at Lomonosov University in Moscow for some time and did historical research in East Berlin. In 1981, when the Solidarity reform movement in Poland challenged the communist authorities, he worked in Warsaw as a correspondent for Vrij Nederland and Het Parool. ¶
Van der Kolk received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Princeton University in the United States. He wrote his first short stories in Princeton, which were published in the literary magazine Maatstaf. His first book, the collection of short stories De Nieuwe Stad (The New City), was published in 1987 by Uitgeverij Veen. In the meantime he worked in Washington as America correspondent for Het Parool. For that newspaper he also made reporting trips to Mexico and the civil war in El Salvador. More short stories were placed in Maatstaf, De Revisor, Hollands Maandblad and Tirade, and collected in the books Klein Amerika (Little America), De bokser(The Boxer), and De dansers (The Dancers). Van der Kolk's first novel Käte Jahn, which was inspired by his time in East Berlin, was published in 1991, followed in the following years by the novels De lachende hond (The Laughing Dog) and Twee geheimen (Two Secrets).
Van der Kolk is an experienced ocean sailor and has made voyages to the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, Haiti, Cuba, Newfoundland, Labrador and Greenland. These adventures formed the basis of the novels De smokkelaar van de Exuma's ( The smuggler of the Exumas), Noordtij (North Tide), De waterverkoper (The water Seller), and Telegram voor Mecánico (Telegram for Mecánico), and the short story collection De drang naar zee (The Lure of the Sea). He was a columnist for the monthly sailing magazine Zeilen. A collection of American stories was published in 2007 (De gekken van Tenakee; The Fools of Tenakee), and a thick book with the best stories from all previous collections in 2014 (Op drift geraakt; Adrift).
In recent years, Van der Kolk went on a five-month ramble through East Africa in preparation for the novel De oogst is voorbij (The Harvest is Past), and on a trip through West Papua for the novel De witte reiger (The White Heron). Geert van der Kolk is married and lives with his wife in Paris. They have two grown children. At the end of 2019, the novel De jongens (The Boys) was published, inspired by his time in Latin School in Apeldoorn.
“Sometimes you read a novel or a short story, and when you’re finished, you’re overwhelmed by a feeling of compassion and pity for all mankind. For a very brief moment you understand it all: that everybody is just trying to live with the best of intentions, that it always ends in a miserable failure, and that there is beauty is this shared tragedy. That is the feeling Geert van der Kolk’s stories evoke.”
Persis Bekkering in de Volkskran
— Persis Bekkering in de Volkskrant