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 is Het boek Ik and apparently does not have any narrative structure; it seems to consist of poetic associations of 'loose' words and thoughts. It is the first in a trilogy. The other volumes are De andere namen and De derde persoon.
Bert Schierbeek was also part of COBRA, an internationalist artistical movement that intended to renew and modernise the postwar visual arts and poetry.
His De Tuinen van Zen was one of the first books on Zen Buddhism to be published in Dutch.
His 'composition novels', composed of fragments, culminated in the multilingual and multimodal Een grote dorst.