Jef Geeraerts


Jozef Adriaan Anna Geeraerts, better known as Jef Geeraerts, was a Belgian writer.
Geeraerts was born in Antwerp. After his studies in political and administrative sciences at the in Antwerp he became a colonial administrator in Belgian Congo. On the independence of the Congo he sent his wife and children back to Belgium and in August 1960 he himself returned to Belgium. During the next six years he was paid by the government. After that time he needed to find a job to survive. He decided to become a writer and went to the University of Brussels to study Germanic languages.

Career as a writer

When he had finished his studies he wrote his first novel, Ik ben maar een neger, which put him on the map as extremely controversial. The book was based on his experience as military in the Congo. He wrote more of these politically motivated colonial books before he started his Gangreen series. There are four parts, Gangreen 1, Gangreen 2, Gangreen 3 and Gangreen 4. These books were sexually explicit, which led to controversy in Belgium. His books were considered by some to be racist and pornographic.
Geeraerts later became famous for his detective stories. Nowadays, he is a celebrated crime-novelist and several of his books have been filmed.
In total Geeraerts wrote 35 novels, some plays and a radio drama. Two of his books were used for a film.

Private life

Geeraerts has three children from his first marriage, among these his daughter Ilse. In 1978, he married Eleonore Vigenon. In the last years of his life he lived in, part of Ghent. He died from a heart attack in Ghent in May 2015.

Awards and recognitions

The town of Antwerp mounted a memory plate on the birth house of Geeraerts. In addition, the town bought his handwritten archive for conservation. The main-belt asteroid 13027 Geeraerts discovered on 3 April 1989 by E. W. Elst at the European Southern Observatory was named after Jef Geeraerts.