A Alberts

Vocation

Notable

Dutch civil servant, writer, translator and journalist. Albert "Bert" Alberts, pen-name A.Alberts was born in Haarlem. His father Jappe Alberts (18 October 1870 5 AM, Rotterdam – 19 February 1925, Apeldoorn) was a sea captain at a ship named Grotius after Hugo de Groot. His mother was Jetske de Boer (24 April 1872, Hindeloopen - 24 June 1962, Zeist). They got 5 children. His eldest brother Wiebe Jappe Alberts (25 Augustus 1900, Amsterdam - 14 april 1987, Voorst) became a professor in history. His youngest brother Karel was born 16 Augustus 1916, Haarlem (d. 19 June 1994, Bosch en Duin). In 1917 the family moved to Apeldoorn. After finishing the HBS high school (1931), he studied Indology at the University of Utrecht. He became a member of Unitas and was befriended with the writers Anton Koolhaas en Leo Vroman. After his graduation (1936), he started a PhD and worked for some time, until June 1939, as a civil servant at the French Ministry of Colonies in Paris. On 22 September 1939 at 4 PM he obtained a doctorate in philosophy and letters with the thesis "Baud and Thorbecke, 1847-1851". His promoters were the professors FC Gerretson (a poet using the pen-name Geerten Gossaert) and H. Westra (Indian constitutional law professor, from 1942 to 1945 NSB mayor of The Hague). On 27 September 1939 he embarked on the ship MS Johan van Barneveld and left for the Dutch East Indies. From November 1939 until March 1942 he served as a civil servant on the island of Madura, Java. After his internment in Tjimahi (near Bandung), by the Japanese, from April 1942 until September 1945, he returned in November 1946 to the Netherlands. He first worked for several months at the Ministry of Overseas Territories in the Department of Political Affairs (under HJ Friedericy), but he resigned from the civil service because he could not reconcile with the government policy towards Indonesia. He then worked several years as executive secretary of the Kina Bureau in Amsterdam. In 1952 he debuted with a bundle of short stories De eilanden (the islands). In May 1953 he became editor of the cultural magazine De Groene Amsterdammer. That year he published his first novel De Bomen (The trees), about a civil servant Aart Duclos, who was more interested in trees than human persons. From early 1959 until early 1960 he worked at Sticusa, the Amsterdam-based Dutch Foundation for Cultural Cooperation with Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. In 1960 he returned to the periodical De Groene Amsterdammer and remained there until May 1965. He thn worked until his retirement in 1976, for the government as a civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1951 he married Aaffiena Beatrix "Fientje" Blijboom (9 April 1928 - 8 September 2011). They got no children. Since 1968 thye lived in Blaricum. In the years before his retirement Alberts wrote three historical works, successively published in 1973, 1975 and 1976 . In 1979 Van Oorschot published The dogs do not hunt anymore. Since 1973, almost every year Van Oorschot published a new book by Alberts. Although he was not a popular writer in the Netherlands, as he was more a writers writer, his work was translated in English and German. He received major Dutch literary awards like Prize of Amsterdam for Groen (Green, 1953) and the Constantijn Huygens Prize (1975) for his oeuvre. On 22 May 1995 he received the PC Hooft Prize for all of his work. He died 16 December 1995, early in the morning in Amsterdam. Since 2005 Van Oorschot published three volumes of his Collected Works. Link to Wikipedia