Lambertus Roelof (Bert) Schierbeek (18 June 1918, Glanerbrug,

Overijssel Overijssel (; ; ; ) is a Provinces of the Netherlands, province of the Netherlands located in the eastern part of the country. The province's name comes from the perspective of the Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht, Episcopal principality of Utrecht ...

– 9 June 1996,

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...

) was a Dutch writer. He won numerous awards throughout his career, amongst them the 1991 Constantijn Huygens Prize. During the German occupation, Schierbeek was part of the resistance movement; directly after the war (in 1945), he published his first, still conventional novel that dealt with exactly these experiences (translated, this novel reads as ''Terror against terror''). Then, he wrote the first experimental novel in the Dutch language, which was published in 1951. Its title is ''Het boek Ik'' (The Book I) and apparently does not have any narrative structure; it seems to consist of poetic associations of 'loose' words and thoughts. It is the first in a trilogy. The other volumes are ''De andere namen'' (The Other Names) and ''De derde persoon'' (The Third Person). Bert Schierbeek was also part of

COBRA COBRA or Cobra, often stylized as CoBrA, was a European avant-garde art group active from 1948 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home countries' capital cities: Copenhagen (Co), Brussels ...

, an internationalist artistical movement that intended to renew and modernise the postwar visual arts and poetry (with members like

Karel Appel Christiaan Karel Appel (; 25 April 1921 – 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-gard ...

, Hugo Claus, Corneille and Lucebert). His ''De Tuinen van Zen'' (The Gardens of Zen, 1959) was one of the first books on Zen Buddhism to be published in Dutch. His 'composition novels', composed of fragments, culminated in the multilingual and multimodal (including illustrations and experimental typography) ''Een grote dorst'' (A Great Thirst, 1968).

References

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at the Digital library for Dutch literature 1918 births 1996 deaths People from Enschede 20th-century Dutch novelists 20th-century Dutch male writers Constantijn Huygens Prize winners International Writing Program alumni Dutch male novelists {{Netherlands-writer-stub