Remco Campert (1929) was one of the group of Dutch poets known as the Vijftigers or ‘Fifties’ poets. Coming to adulthood under the shadow of the war, they felt the need for a poetry that took nothing for granted, in terms of form or content. Beyond their ties of friendship, what united this rather varied group was their opposition to a literary tradition that in the aftermath of the occupation felt outmoded. Instead they chose for experiment and, in Campert’s case, for a language closer to common speech. He was the most accessible of his contemporaries and, perhaps because of this, his work has always appealed to a broad public.

With his poems, stories, newspaper columns and novels, Remco Campert has been for some fifty years one of the most talked about authors in Dutch literature. Campert is well known as the writer with a melancholic tone, who, in all the genres that he practices, is searching for that one elusive, ephemeral moment of happiness.
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