Biography
Van de Wetering was born and raised in Rotterdam, but in later years he lived in South Africa, Japan, London, Colombia, Peru, Australia, Amsterdam and most recently in Surry, Maine, the setting of two of his Grijpstra and de Gier novels and his children's series about the porcupine Hugh Pine.
Van de Wetering studied Zen under the guidance of Oda Sessō, together with Walter Nowick, at Daitoku-ji. Van de Wetering lived a year in Daitoku-Ji and half a year with Nowick and described these in The Empty Mirror. Van de Wetering describes a visit to the monastery by the highly respected Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle, describing his own mixed thoughts about this representative of what he deemed an old-fashioned religion. Sōkō Morinaga, Walter Nowick's Dharma brother, wrote in Novice to Master about traditional practices at that time.
His many travels and his experiences in a Zen Buddhist monastery and as a member of the Amsterdam Special Constabulary ("being a policeman in one's spare time" as he phrased it in his introduction to Outsider in Amsterdam) lent authenticity to his works of fiction and nonfiction.
Van de Wetering was awarded the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1984.
Read more about this topic: Janwillem Van De Wetering
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)