Bert Schierbeek

Who was Bert Schierbeek?

Lambertus Roelof Schierbeek was a Dutch writer. He won numerous awards throughout his career, amongst them the 1991 Constantijn Huygens Prize.

During the German occupation, Schierbeek was part of the resistance movement; directly after the war, he published his first, still conventional novel that dealt with exactly these experiences. Then, he wrote the first experimental novel in the Dutch language, which was published in 1951. Its title reads as The book I, and apparently does not have any narrative structure; it seems to consist of poetic associations of 'loose' words and thoughts.

Bert Schierbeek was also part of COBRA, an internationalist artistical movement that intented to renew and modernise the postwar visual arts and poetry.