Frank Westerman

Frank Martin Westerman (born 13 November 1964) is a Dutch writer and a former journalist. He studied tropical agricultural engineering at Wageningen University and worked as a news correspondent for de Volkskrant in Belgrade and NRC Handelsblad in Moscow. He is currently a full-time writer of non-fiction books, among which are The Republic of Grain, Engineers of the Soul (2002), and Ararat (2007).

Life

Frank Martin Westerman was born on 13 November 1964 in Emmen in the Netherlands. He grew up in Assen, in a Christian-reformed family. Westerman studied tropical agricultural engineering at the Agricultural University of Wageningen. In 1987, he travelled to Peru, where he did research in Puno. In this period, he also started working as a journalist.

In 1992, he became correspondent of de Volkskrant in Belgrade. In 1995, Westerman and his colleague were two of the few journalists who were in Srebrenica during its capture. The book Srebrenica: The Blackest Scenario which they wrote using confidential UN documents and interviews with earwitnesses, aims to reconstruct the war and massacre in Srebrenica.

Between 1997 and 2002, Westerman was a correspondent of NRC Handelsblad in Moscow. As a journalist, he visited many places in the former Soviet Union. After a visit to Armenia in 1999, Westerman decided to climb Mount Ararat. His thoughts about this Biblical mountain, where – according to Christian, Muslim and Jewish beliefs – Noah's Ark landed, the memories and re-evaluation of his religious childhood, and his impressions of Armenia and Turkey are the main subjects of the book Ararat: In search of the mythical mountain (translated into English by Sam Garrett in 2008).

Currently, he is a full-time writer based in Amsterdam.