JJ Voskuil

JJ Voskuil (2001)

The grave of JJ Voskuil in the grave of his in-laws in the Oud Eik en Duinen cemetery in The Hague.

Johannes Jacobus (Han) Voskuil (born July 1, 1926 in The Hague ; died May 1, 2008 in Amsterdam ) was a Dutch folklorist and writer.

Life

JJ Voskuil was the son of the social democratic journalist Klaas Voskuil. He studied Dutch at the University of Amsterdam and then worked as a translator for the European Coal and Steel Community in Strasbourg and as a teacher in Groningen . In Amsterdam he worked as an assistant in the edition of the works of Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft before he got a job at the Instituut voor Dialectologie, Volks- en Naamkunde (today Meertens Instituut , Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences ) in 1957, where he compiled a subject catalog of folklore .

Voskuil's first novel, Bij nader inzien , was published in 1963 without any major response. After he retired in 1987, he began to write the novel Het Bureau in 1990, in which he processed his 30 years of professional activity at the Meertens Instituut in a kind of professional autobiography. The seven-volume novel, written in just four and a half years, comprises a total of around 5200 book pages. The individual volumes appeared from 1996 to 2000 and led to a veritable bureau mania in the Netherlands with long queues in front of the bookstores, fan clubs in factories and offices and numerous interviews with the author and the characters in the novel that he worked on in literary terms. When writing his novel, the folklorist Voskuil “applied his scientific tool to his own workplace and the very special customs of the office .” The Dutch bought almost half a million books from the series of office novels.

For his literary work, Voskuil received various awards in the Netherlands, for example the F. Bordewijk-prijs for individual volumes from the 1997 office cycle , the 1998 Prix ​​des Ambassadeurs and the Libris literatuurprijs . Het Bureau ranks among the top ten of the Internet best list of all Dutch books ever published by the NPS and NRC Handelsblad in 2007 .

Voskuil tried to practice an alternative way of life and was involved in animal welfare .

His grave is in the Oud Eik en Duinen cemetery in The Hague .

Works (selection)

• Het Bureau . GA van Oorschot, Amsterdam 1996-2000.
• Meneer Beerta , 1996.
  • The office 1. Director Beerta . Translated by Gerd Busse . Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-63733-9 .
• Vuile handen , 1996.
  • The office 2. Dirty hands . Translated by Gerd Busse . Verbrecher, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-95732-007-0 .
• Plankton , 1997.
  • The office 3. Plankton . Translated by Gerd Busse . Verbrecher, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-95732-008-7 .
• Het AP Beerta-Instituut , 1998.
  • The office 4. The AP Beerta Institute . Translated by Gerd Busse . Verbrecher, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-95732-009-4 .
• En ook weemoedigheid, 1999 .
  • The office 5. And sadness too . Translated by Gerd Busse . Verbrecher, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-95732-010-0 .
• Afgang (departure), 2000.
• De dood van Maarten Koning . 2000.
  • The office 7. The death of Maarten Koning . Translated by Gerd Busse. Verbrecher, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-95732-012-4 .

Awards

• 1998: Libris Literature Prize for Het Bureau 3: Plankton, ISBN 978-90-282-0955-8 .

literature

• Gerd Busse (Ed.): Het Bureau: An evening with JJ Voskuil and Lut Missine . Waxmann, Münster 2011, ISBN 978-3-8309-2458-6 .
  • Het Bureau. An evening with JJ Voskuil (PDF; 236 kB), Netherlands Studies, Supplement 4, 2011

Web links

Commons : JJ Voskuil  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about JJ Voskuil in the catalog of the German National Library
• JJ Voskuil in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Short biography and reviews of works by JJ Voskuil at perlentaucher.de
• Erik van Halsema: JJ Voskuil 'Het Bureau' - reviews (nl)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Florian Keisinger: The world of work before the era of efficiency . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 26, 2017, p. 10.
2. ↑ Christoph Bartmann: In the dust biotope , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 29, 2012, p. 14 Süddeutsche.de
3. ↑ www.das-büro-der-roman.de ( Memento of the original dated December 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from Beck-Verlag  
4. ↑ Lijst van beste Nederlandstalige boeken , see Dutch Wikipedia nl: Lijst van beste Nederlandstalige boeken