Life
Herman de Coninck was born in Mechelen, Belgium, where his parents ran a Catholic bookshop. He attended the Sint-Rombouts College in Mechelen where he contributed to the school newspaper. Determined to become a writer, he studied Germanic philology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. While in Leuven he wrote for the University paper Universitas. Graduating in 1966, he took up teaching in Berchem while he lived in Heverlee, near Leuven. In 1967 he fulfilled his compulsary civilian duty in the Belgian army.
In 1970 he left teaching to become an editor of the weekly magazine HUMO, a post he held until 1983. During this period he regularly delivered interviews together with Piet Piryns. These interviews were collected and published as Woe is Woe in de Nedderlens in 1972.
Tired of interviews, he became editor-in-chief of the magazine Nieuw Wereldtijdschrift in 1983. Under his direction, NWT combined journalism and literature. Since De Coninck was less of a businessman than a writer, the magazine was not a commercial success.
While on his way to a literary colloquium with several other Flemish and Dutch poets and writers (amongst them Hugo Claus, Anna Enquist and Gerrit Komrij), Herman de Coninck collapsed in the streets of Lisbon, Portugal on May 22, 1997. He died there at the age of 53 from a heart failure. A year later, his widow Kristien Hemmerechts wrote a very personal and biographical monologue entitled Taal Zonder Mij (1998).
Read more about this topic: Herman De Coninck
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Roger Thornhill: Has life been like that?
Eve Kendall: Uhm mm.
Roger Thornhill: How come?
Eve Kendall: Men like you.
Roger Thornhill: What’s wrong with men like me?
Eve Kendall: They don’t believe in marriage.
Roger Thornhill: I’ve been married twice.
Eve Kendall: See what I mean?”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled—or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?”
—Edmund White (b. 1940)
“I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—at the end of life just ready to be born,—affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)