Arthur Japin

Arthur Valentijn Japin (born 26 July 1956) is a Dutch novelist. He has won almost every prestigious prize in Dutch literature, including the Libris Prize for his 2005 novel Een Schitterend Gebrek.

Biography Arthur Japin, son of a teacher and detective novelist, experienced a difficult childhood marked by his father's suicide in 1969. He later trained as an actor at the Kleinkunstacademie in Amsterdam and briefly sang opera at De Nederlandse Opera.

His first novel, De zwarte met het witte hart (1997), translated as The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, was the story of two Ashanti princes, Kwame Poku and Kwasi Boachi, who were taken from today's Ghana and taken to the court of the Dutch king Willem I in 1837. In November 2007, an opera based on the novel premiered in Rotterdam, with an English libretto by Arthur Japin and music by the British composer Jonathan Dove.

His second book, De droom van de leeuw (2002), is a novelized version of his relationship with the Dutch actress and novelist Rosita Steenbeek in Rome, where Steenbeek became the last lover of the Italian director Federico Fellini. His third novel, Een schitterend gebrek, translated as In Lucia's Eyes (2003), was a return to the historical novel, about Casanova's first lover, Lucia, who, he reports in his memoirs, inexplicably abandoned him in his youth, only to resurface years later as a hideous prostitute in an Amsterdam brothel. Japin was hailed as a great writer after his first couple of novels already, a status confirmed when he was asked to write the 2006 Boekenweekgeschenk: De grote wereld is a novella about a pair of circus-performing dwarves caught in Nazi Germany, which had a record first printing of 813,000 copies.

His 2007 novel De overgave, to be translated as Someone Found, takes the subject of the 19th-century Texas–Indian wars, dramatizing the story of the Fort Parker Massacre of 1836, in which a white girl, Cynthia Ann Parker, was taken as a Comanche hostage, later becoming the mother of the famous Comanche chief Quanah Parker.

Japin has also published several volumes of stories. The first two, Magonische verhalen and De vierde wand, were gathered into the omnibus Alle verhalen (2005). Magonische verhalen was made into the film Magonia by the Dutch director Ineke Smits. He has won almost every prestigious prize in Dutch literature, including the Libris Prize for Een schitterend gebrek.

Personal life Japin lives in Utrecht with his publicist Lex Jansen and his partner Benjamin Moser, an American writer.