Cees Nooteboom

Nooteboom's childhood home in The Hague was partly destroyed in a wartime bombing that killed neighbors instantly; he left formal schooling in his teens and spent his twenties hitchhiking and working odd jobs across Europe, filing travel dispatches that would make him one of the continent's most celebrated travel writers long before his novels found equal acclaim.

Rituals, following a wealthy, drifting Amsterdam heir between two mentors devoted to private systems of ceremony, won the Dutch Multatuli Prize and established the cool, essayistic voice of his fiction. He has continued moving between novels (The Following Story, All Souls' Day) and travel writing for decades, dividing his time between Amsterdam, Berlin, and a house on Menorca, a rootlessness that shows up everywhere in his prose.