David Van Reybrouck

David Grégoire Van Reybrouck ( born September 11, 1971 in Bruges, Flanders, Belgium ) is a Flemish -speaking Belgian author, historian and archaeologist.

Life

Van Reybroucks father worked immediately after the independence of the former Belgian Congo colony there as a railway engineer. His son received his doctorate at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

Van Reybroucks first book in 2002 was De plaag ( The Plague). It takes place in South Africa after the end of apartheid and was honored in the Netherlands and in Belgium with several prizes. In 2007 he was co-author on a Situtationsbericht about his home country, which in 2008 was followed by a provocative book entitled plea for populism. His most famous book is from 2010, Congo. Een geschiedenis, which appeared in German in 2012. It tells the story of the Congo from colonial times to the recent past.

Today Van Reybrouck organized in the Democratic Republic of Congo Congolese workshops for writers both in Kinshasa and in the east of the country, in Goma.

Prizes and awards

For his book Congo Een geschiedenis Van Reybrouck received a number of awards, including:

  • 2010: AKO Literatuurprijs, Netherlands
  • 2012: Prix Médicis essai, France
  • 2012: NDR Kultur Nonfiction Book

Publications (selection)

  • 2010: Congo: Een geschiedenis. De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, ISBN 978-90-234-5663-6. 2012: German, translated by Waltraud Hüsmert: Congo: A History, Suhrkamp, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-518-42307-3.
NDR Kultur Sachbuchpreis Integrated Authority File
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