Hugo Claus

Associated in Paris with the avant-garde CoBrA art movement in his youth, Claus proved equally brilliant across poetry, theater, film directing, and fiction. In 1950, he published De Metsiers at age twenty-one, winning immediate critical acclaim for its raw Faulknerian power.

His magnum opus Het verdriet van België (1983), following young Louis Seynaeve through boarding school and World War II in Flanders, became the definitive psychological portrait of the nation. Claus was awarded the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren and repeatedly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature.