The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by UCL in 2019 in recognition of his contribution to world literature. His novels, poems and travel writing have been studied by generations of UCL students – not only students of Dutch Studies, but also of comparative literature and translation studies. 

Today, his books have been translated into thirty-eight languages and are read all round the world – in China, Japan, Korea, Turkey and Russia, for example, as well as across Europe and the Americas. This most cosmopolitan of Dutch writers always wrote in the Dutch language, as though his mother tongue provided him with an anchor, a sense of home.

Cees Nooteboom will be remembered for his playful yet deeply philosophical novels which have transformed the traumas of war and personal loss into something life-affirming. All Souls’ Day (2001), set in Berlin, connects with European conflicts through the main character who both lives with the loss of his wife and son and falls victim to street violence. The novel shows us that these violent acts are linked through time, as if major conflict is being re-enacted in everyday life. Recovery comes through simple acts of kindness like the tap dance a friend performs for the main character in his hospital bed.

Nooteboom’s travel writing is a lesson in looking, responding and connecting to what lies beneath the surface through the writer’s musings on the places he visits. In Roads to Santiago (1997) readers sense the author’s erudition as he ranges across European thought, geography, and all kinds of history - especially art, architectural, political and social history. He allows telling detail to filter into his writing, delighting us without ever overloading us. This writing has the power to change the way we see things. 

The same might be said of Nooteboom’s poetry which is less widely read but highly evocative of place and experience, poetry in which the poet communes with nature in ‘droombeelden uit the werkelijkheid’ (dream images from reality). 

Prof Jane Fenoulhet

Emeritus Professor, School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS)