Biography
Willem Frederik Hermans was born on 1 September 1921 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Hermans married Emmy Meurs (1923–2008), a black Surinam woman, in 1950.
In 1958, Hermans was appointed reader in physical geography at Groningen University. In 1972, after accusations by among others the Calvinist Member of Parliament and later minister Jan de Koning that Hermans was using his time writing instead of lecturing, a parliamentary committee was set up to investigate the matter. The committee found that Hermans's chief crime was his use of university stationery for writing his notes.
In 1973, he resigned and settled as a full-time writer in Paris. In Onder professoren (Among professors) (1975) he described university life in Groningen in a bitter and satirical way. It can be read as a roman à clef and was entirely written on the empty sides of university letters, according to Hermans's alter ego Zomerplaag 'to do something useful with this expensive paper that would normally disappear unread in the garbage bin, polluting the environment'.
Hermans received honorary doctorates from the University of Liège (Luik) in 1990 and the University of Pretoria in 1993.
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