Lutz Dijk

Lutz van Dijk (born 1955 ) is a German and Dutch author and educator.

Biography Lutz van Dijk was born in 1955 in the outskirts of West Berlin, near the Berlin Wall. He initially worked as a special education teacher in Hamburg and later joined the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

Van Dijk received his doctorate in 1987 at the University of Hamburg, with his thesis being in the field of educational sciences and teachers who opposed Nazism in Germany. In the summer of 2009, he was named an honorary professor in poetics at the Research Center for Children's and Young Adult Literature at the University of Oldenburg.

In his writing, Van Dijk deals with topics related to Nazism and homosexuality Van Dijk also wrote Kampala-Hamburg, a book about a gay refugee from Uganda who escapes persecution in his native country and flees to Hamburg with the help of German LGBTQ+ activists.

In early 2001, Van Dijk founded the aid organization HOKISA (Homes for Kids in South Africa) in a town near Cape Town.

Awards and nominations Van Dijk was nominated in 2021 for the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, and in 2023, he was a nominee at the Stonewall Awards for his LGBTQ+ activism. In 1997, Van Dijk was awarded with the Youth Literature Award of Namibia and, in 2001, he received the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize.