Remco Campert

author

Dutch^[1] b. 28 July 1929, Den Haag^[1] d. 4 July 2022, Amsterdam^[1] active 1950–2018

Remco Wouter Campert was a versatile Dutch poet, novelist, columnist, and children's book author. A prominent member of the 'Vijftigers' (The Fifties) literary movement, he debuted in 1950 with the poetry collection 'Het leven is vurrukkulluk'. His work is characterized by its accessibility, often blending autobiographical elements with irony and cynicism. He was widely popular for his prose, which explored various genres from children's literature to satirical novels. Campert received numerous accolades, including the P.C. Hooft Prize in 1976 and the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren in 2015.^[1,2]

poetry
autobiography
satire
children's literature

Remco Campert: Poetry, Prose, and Collaboration

A sourced introduction to Remco Campert’s place in postwar Dutch literature and the photographic-book collaboration represented in the catalogue.

The identity behind the catalogue’s Remco Campert record is securely established by the ISNI authority record: Remco Wouter Campert (1929–2022), an author whose authorised forms include “Campert, Remco Wouter” and whose record links the pseudonyms Erce and Moreno. The Digital Library for Dutch Literature (DBNL), an independent scholarly digital library, gives his birth as 28 July 1929 in The Hague and his death as 4 July 2022 in Amsterdam.

Campert came into view in the immediate postwar literary culture through Braak, the experimental magazine he founded with Rudy Kousbroek in 1950. The Dutch national library’s overview identifies him as one of the Vijftigers, a group that rejected inherited literary conventions in favour of experiment. It also characterises his poetry as associative, shaped by jazz, and at once realistic and ironic. Those terms are useful orientation rather than a substitute for the poems: they describe a writer whose work moved easily among poetry, fiction, short stories, columns, and children’s books.

The scale of that activity is visible in the DBNL author bibliography, which records early separate publications including Ten lessons with Timothy (1950), Vogels vliegen toch (1951), and Een standbeeld opwinden (1952), followed by the 1961 first edition of Het leven is vurrukkulluk. The Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren biography further records that Campert and Kousbroek’s first issue of Braak appeared in May 1950, and that Campert later returned to sustained writing after a period of little new publication in the 1970s.

The catalogue connection: Achter Glas

Campert’s presence in a photography-book catalogue is therefore not an anomaly. The linked catalogue copy of Achter Glas (1961) credits Joan van der Keuken and Remco Campert. That collaboration belongs beside the wider range of Campert’s practice rather than outside it: the national library explicitly notes his writing across several literary forms, while the Prize biography records later work in columns and live literary programmes. The catalogue record should be read as evidence of a meeting between a photographer’s book and a writer whose career was never confined to a single genre—not as grounds for claims about individual photographs or the book’s visual sequence.

Campert also received major official recognition: the Dutch national library records the P.C. Hooft Prize (1979) and the Gouden Ganzenveer (2011), while the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren presents him as its 2015 laureate.