Geert van Istendael

(Belgium, 1947) is a writer and translator. Formerly he was also a journalist and newsreader with the Flemish television journal. He became well known as the author of well-documented books about Belgium and Brussels. In 1989's Het Belgisch labyrint (The Belgian Labyrinth), he analyzes his country of birth with passion and erudition. Mijn Nederland (My Netherlands) appeared in 2005, a response to the request to explain Holland to the desperate Dutch. With 1991's Verhalen van het Heggeland (Stories from Heggeland), but even more so with 1997's Altrapsodie, he made his name as a novelist. In his poetry, he breaks with a society losing itself in "disastrous modernization." In various debates he's stated his belief in a Greater Netherlands, a Benelux, in which the German, French and Dutch languages and cultures would enrich one another. In 2007 his daughter Judith Vanistendael published the graphic novel De maagd en de neger (The Virgin and the Negro), based on a short story of her father's about the love between and economics student and a political refugee from Togo. His collection Het was wat (That Was Something) has been nominated for the 2016 VSB Poetry Prize.