Michel Maas

(Roermond, NL 1954) is De Volkskrant and NOS Journaal (Dutch 8 o' clock news) correspondent in southeast Asia. He studied philosophy and worked as a journalist for De Volkskrant from 1986. As a literary reporter he talked to A.F.Th. van der Heijden, W.F. Hermans, Hugo Claus among others and Nobel Prize winners Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. In 1994 his first novel was published, De Vleugels van Lieu Hanh (Lieu Hanh's Wings), on a journey through Vietnam in which history plays a prominent role. It won him the Geertjan Lubberhuizen Prize. In 1996 he settled as eastern Europe correspondent in Budapest and covered the war in Kosovo. His reports were collected in Kosovo: Verslag van een oorlog (Kosovo: Report of a War). It was awarded the NDP Prize for daily newspaper journalism. In 2001 he exchanged eastern Europe for southeast Asia and started working for NOS (a public network). In 2010 he himself was in the news when during a live radio broadcast of the eviction of a protest camp in Bangkok he was shot at.