Harry Mulisch

Mulisch's father was an Austrian bank official who collaborated with the German occupiers, helping confiscate Jewish assets, while his mother was Jewish, a contradiction he later called the very definition of his life, and one he spent decades writing his way around. He published his first novel at twenty and became one of the 'Great Three' of postwar Dutch fiction alongside Hermans and Reve, prolific across novels, essays, and journalism.

The Assault (1982), tracing the ripple effects of a wartime killing through one family's decades, became an Oscar-winning film and his best-known work abroad. The Discovery of Heaven, an ambitious late novel braiding a lifelong friendship with a cosmic frame story about the fate of the Ten Commandments, was voted the best Dutch novel of the twentieth century in a national poll. He died in Amsterdam in 2010.