Hugo Claus

Born in Bruges and raised partly by nuns, Claus spent time in Paris among the Cobra movement's painters and poets before settling into a prolific, restless career across nearly every literary form (poetry, theater, screenwriting, and fiction) that made him Flanders's most celebrated postwar writer.

The Sorrow of Belgium (1983), his acknowledged masterpiece, follows young Louis Seynaeve's coming of age in a Flemish family swept up in enthusiasm for the Nazi occupation, tracing collaboration as a slow, plausible seduction of ordinary people rather than inexplicable villainy.

Perpetually mentioned for the Nobel Prize without ever winning it, he kept writing and provoking (plays, poems, screenplays) until choosing euthanasia in Antwerp in 2008 after an Alzheimer's diagnosis, dying on his own terms as he had lived.