Ferdinand Bordewijk (10 October 1884 – 28 April 1965) was a Dutch author. His style, which is terse and symbolic, is considered to belong to New Objectivity and magic realism. He was awarded the P. C. Hooft Award in 1953 and the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 1957. He wrote novels and short stories; of his novels, his 1938 Character is canonical in the Netherlands, and was the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.

Biography

Ferdinand Bordewijk was born in Amsterdam, and moved with his family to The Hague when he was ten. He studied law at Leiden University. After graduation, he worked first at a Rotterdam law firm and became an independent lawyer in Schiedam in 1919, remaining an inhabitant of The Hague all of his life. He was married to the composer Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman. He wrote the libretto for her opera Rotonde (1941).

Works

His first published work was a volume of poetry titled Paddestoelen ("Mushrooms") under the pseudonym Ton Ven. It was not particularly well received. His breakthrough came with the short novels Blokken ("Blocks", 1931), Knorrende Beesten ("Growling Animals", 1933) and Bint (1934), later frequently published together as a set of three, followed by the longer works Rood paleis ("Red Palace", 1936) and Karakter (1938, translated into English as Character in 1966). Blokken was a dystopian work which was perceived as a criticism of communism. It is comparable to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which appeared one year later and which Bordewijk deemed to be junk ("een enorme prul").