Leon de Winter

Biography

Leon de Winter (b. 1954) became known in the early 1980s with subdued, intellectual novels like Zoeken naar Eileen W (Looking for Eileen W.) and La Place de la Bastille, but he later concentrated on creating vehicles for his most important themes – Jewish identity after the Second World War, good and evil – in what he refers to as ‘good reads.’ Kaplan (1986), SuperTex (1991), Zionoco (1995) and God’s Gym (2002) each became bestsellers. De Winter invariably writes about a man in a crisis, searching for his (Jewish) roots and being forced to make existential choices. His cinematic style reflects the fact that De Winter is also a film maker. Het recht op terugkeer (The Right of Return, 2008) has been nominated for both the AKO Literature Prize and the NS Public’s Choice Prize.

Titles

The Hollywood Sky

(De hemel van Hollywood, 1997)

De hemel van Hollywood is like a house of mirrors: from the opening lines to the last page mysterious tension surrounds the question as to which representation of reality is actually confronting us. On the surface the novel is a straightforward thriller, De Winter’s favourite genre. Since the trilogy Vertraagde roman (Delayed Novel), Kaplan and Hoffman’s honger he has written fast-paced, well-tailored literary thrillers. Continued...

The Right of Return

(Het recht op terugkeer, 2008)

In The Right of Return Leon de Winter has written an audacious book that demonstrates more powerfully than ever that he is a prophet of doom. In this science-fiction novel, set mainly in 2024 and 2025, he describes a doom scenario in which Israel has been reduced in size and beleaguered to such an extent that it is virtually uninhabitable. Continued...